Because people who do ride the bus know that this is a stupid idea:
Under its proposal, the I-90 center corridor would be acquired by Sound Transit exclusively for light rail between Seattle and the Eastside. Buses, vanpools, HOVs and all Mercer Island vehicular traffic now using this inner corridor would be rerouted to the outer lanes.
The result would be increased delays and congestion on all traffic moving between Seattle and the Eastside. The cost of building light rail to the Eastside would be $6 billion. The I-90 bridge would suffer a vehicle capacity loss of one-third compared with today. Even with an optimistic doubling of transit ridership, there would be a 9-percent loss of total (vehicle and transit) person trips.
Light rail would not give us either the flexibility or the capacity that rapid bus service offers at a small fraction of the cost. Bus rapid transit can share the center lanes, thus avoiding the one-third loss of vehicular traffic.
People who like Bus Rapid Transit are people who never ride the bus. BRT is cheaper because, almost all of the time, it sucks.
The fact that Phil Talmadge would sign on with rightwingers like former Sen. Jim Horn and the Washington Policy Center shows just how out of touch Talmadge is these days. Phil also campaigned hard for a new elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct. The vote for the new Viaduct failed in every Seattle legislative district except, you guessed it, West Seattle’s 34th LD (Talmadge was the state senator from West Seattle for years). Talmadge is opposite many Republicans on the Eastside like Connie Marshall, the former Mayor of Bellevue. She supports rail, but this one-kidneyed liberal Democrat from Seattle doesn’t. Weird.
What happened to the Phil Talmadge who told Tim Eyman to go fuck himself? The Talmadge who challenged a sitting Democratic Governor in 2003 for not being progressive enough? Phil gave an anti-war speech to the Democrats at the King County Convention that was fiery as hell back in ’04?
Go figure.