Before I left my Belltown apartment, I checked the Metro Trip Planner to find out exactly which route to take and where to catch it. It told me to catch the 26 at 4th and Blanchard. The 26 never showed up. I had taken the 16 to the same Wallingford address, so I rounded the block to the 16’s stop. The 16 was there in less than a minute.
After the fireworks ended, I walked down to Stoneway Ave to put myself in the path of either the 16 or the 26 (or any bus headed for downtown). I lucked out, and the 16 arrived within a few minutes. Thankfully, it wasn’t jammed full of people. But when my bus neared the Seattle Center, the whole operation came to a halt. The bus was jammed, stuck in the same traffic as folks driving their SOVs. The bus driver had trouble getting from the right lane to the left lane to merge onto 5th Ave (under the monorail). It was a good 15 minute slog to go about 10 blocks.
All in all, taking public transportation to and from the event was okay. The biggest hassle was the Seattle Center area. When folks I respect, like Joel Connelly, talk about eschewing light rail in favor of more buses, I wish he’s riding the bus with me so he can see what I see. When Ted Van Dyk and Richard Morrill (two old guys who haven’t relied on public transport since the Eisenhower administration) talk about how light rail is a waste of money, I just smile. They’ll be eating dirt while the next generation rides the rails.
I tend to think that the basic issues of density and geography mean that buses will continue to be a major portion of our transportation system. While I look forward to the experience of rapid rail transit that I have experienced in NYC, DC, Boston, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and other cities (haven’t actually tried Portland), I suspect that enhanced bus service will carry more passengers more miles. Certainly more passengers more miles per dollar spent.
Any serious consideration of enhanced bus service should include the same kind of dedicated right of way as rail. It should be a lot cheaper to simply take capacity from SOVs and dedicate it to buses using mostly paint, and maybe some hard scape.
But a train will be a lot more fun.
Will, I suspect you’ll be eating dirt too before you can make that same fast trip from Wallingford to anywhere downtown via rail. Good thing it’s a short walk from the Seattle Center to Bell Town.
Don’t worry, light rail’s day will come. Click here for photo of 4th and Blanchard after the oil runs out. http://tinyurl.com/2lnsg2
And click here for photo of Mark the Redneck’s SUV, 2020 model: http://tinyurl.com/2j3h4t
1. Roger Rabbit says:
Don’t worry, light rail’s day will come. Click here for photo of 4th and Blanchard after the oil runs out. http://tinyurl.com/2lnsg2
Yep little bunny some time in the next century maybe you might have a light rail power by bicycles. You can’t even fix the pot holes in Seattle let alone build a mass transit system.
By the way Roger is the present day Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda like Paul Joseph Goebbels for the Socialist Democrats Party. His Nazi friends taught him the trade when he visited them in jail.
Sound Transit’s new motto:
“You can’t get there from here.”
@4 Why should I fix potholes? It’s not my responsibility. Bush has been president for 6 1/2 years — how many potholes has he fixed? All he’s done is make bomb craters in Baghdad! Make HIM ride a bicycle!!
Rabbits are supposed to dig holes, not fill ’em, dumbass.
you had it good! it took me over two hours to get from the greenlake area to north capitol hill. i had to take the 44 east, but it was late so i missed the 49 going south by a couple minutes. I waited at 43rd and 15th for almost an hour because there were supposed to be multiple 49’s. Whenever a bus stopped I asked the driver if they knew where the 49 was, but none of them did. FINALLY another 43 passed and said that the 49 had come off the wire and would not be running for a while, so I should get on board. I did, and then had to walk from 23rd and Aloha to Broadway and Blaine (right below 10th). GAH buses.
Isn’t Skyway great?
http://www.kirotv.com/news/13625065/detail.html
This exchange between me and Proud Leftist is so good, I am going to post it in every thread on HA from now on. It destroys the Publicans’ stupid talking points – period.
“I’m working really hard to understand how President Bill Clinton’s actions act as justifcation for the righties. Read this fuckwads.
If your lame ass argument is that Bill Clinton was a bad President – which is what you say – and if your argument now is that the AWOL coward GW Bush is in someway comparable to Bill Clinton, what you are actually saying is that GW Bush is NO BETTER THAN CLINTON.
Does it hurt to be that stupid? I really want to know.
proud leftist says:
RES @ 18
You’ve hit it on the nose. The rightwing fringefucks consider Clinton to be the personification of evil–indeed, he is the devil incarnate in their twisted little minds. Nonetheless, their justification for all of the Bushites’ sins is, always, “well, Clinton did it, too.” Methinks they never studied logic.”
I came to Seattle by way of St. Louis, MO. I lived in St. Louis when their Metrolink system was in the planning stages, and I remember the grumbling there about costs, skepticism about whether people would ever ride it, worries about train-linked crime, and so on. Given how St. Louis had operated before the Metrolink, some of these concerns seemed well founded. However, after the train and park and ride stations went in, it became a runaway success, with ridership (from throughout the community) far exceeding projections and always growing. I used the Metrolink every day myself to get to work and it was always on time, comfortable, and lightning-fast. After a few years, light rail became part of the culture.
In St. Louis they were able to build the first generation Metrolink system on an existing rail corridor, so no one’s house had to be torn down or streets removed to get it started (big infrastructure changes were needed for the later rail expansion, however), and this corridor happened to pass all the major destinations in the city. If the land were available here and a rail system could be built that would get you where you need to go (or close enough), I have no doubt that it could be enormously successful and bring a lot more people to transit who would never ride a bus.
6
Is that a good idea? Remember what happened the last time he got on a bicycle?
Hmmmmm, on second thought . . .
Bus Rapid Transit is planned for Aurora. Will we dedicate the curb lane to buses? It is a moderate walk to Aurora from Gasworks, but it could then be a five minute bus ride to downtown.
I rode my bicycle to Gasworks (kid in tow on the trail-a-bike), and it was great. The event planners dedicated a special entrance for bicycles, with a bike corral, next to a nice grassy area. http://familyfourth.org/gettingthere.html Great view and easy to get to. We arrived just as the American Flag was going overhead, parked the bike, threw ourselves down on the grass and enjoyed.
Could have used the proposed bike lane on Stone Way avenue going north when I was leaving. Between the cars and the crowds, biking was a little tough getting out. But still a lot more pleasant than than driving to get back to my neighborhood in Greenwood.
With big crowds descending on a destination, we have to use our rights of way more efficiently. Buses, bikes, and walking should get greater priority on the roadway. They use a lot less space per person than autos do.
Just a few comments about one of the columns referenced above. Mr Van Dyk said:
– and –
I’m wondering if Mr. Van Dyk has visited a small, obscure little town with an unknown little rail transit system. The town would be San Francisco (and the entire San Francisco Bay area) and that little rail transit system would be BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit system).
Oddly enough, the San Francisco Bay has topography that is remarkably similar to the Puget Sound, and the population densities and growth patterns of the Puget Sound today are also similar to what the San Francisco Bay looked like thirty years ago.
Of course, thirty years ago, people were making the same arguments against BART that they are making against SoundTransit today.
Go back far enough, you’ll find people that said that if man were meant to fly, we’d have wings, and that railroads were a terrible idea, doomed to fail.
Wings? Railroads? Heck, I remember sitting around the newly-discovered fire with my friends Og and Thag saying this wheel thing was never going to catch on. Boy, do I look foolish now or what?
12 “Remember what happened the last time (Bush) got on a bicycle?”
Yeah, Lance Armstrong ran out on his fiance’.
Oh, you mean the time before that?
They’ll be eating dirt because that’s all they will be able to afford paying for this boondoggle. Seattle can’t keep a mile of Monorail running for more than a few months.
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