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Third Avenue: A Love Letter

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Dear Third Avenue bus traffic during rush hour;

I had my doubts when I first started using you. I mean I never know how many people at my stop are buying drugs and how many are actually catching the bus. But damn, once I get on the bus, it’s so wonderful.

I love the dance the buses do when skipping a stop. When it works (and usually it does) it’s so seamless. I love that it’s not stuck with the cars in traffic. Despite myself, I love seeing cars pulled over for using it. It’s better than the other streets.

Don’t get me wrong, I know we’ve had our problems. When it rains hard the system seems to fall apart. I don’t know if that’s more people riding than normal or if it’s worse driving from bus drivers. I often take the tunnel even though it’s a less convenient stop.

Still when you’re working, you’re the best way to get North or South downtown.

Love,
Carl Ballard

Comments

  1. 1

    Carl, you should check this out:

    Urban Highways as Land Banks
    Last week I attended the “Re-Imaging Urban Highways” program in Philadelphia with my friend Scott. Organized by Drexel University and The Next American City, the event was a who’s who of visionary planners at the top of their game. The presentations focused on portions of the Interstate system that cut through cities and ways in which communities, planners, and local political leaders can ameliorate the negative impacts of these behemoths.
    …
    As much as it’s about getting rid of ugly freeways which divide neighborhoods, it’s also about economics. A comment made by the panel at “Re-Imaging Urban Highways” rang especially true; The land dedicated to urban freeways is an open faucet leaking money from the city. Instead of property tax revenue, new businesses, vitality, and population growth, these highways consume land, depress land values, and give nothing back except a marginally shorter car ride for (usually non-resident) commuters. I could make a mother-in-law joke here, but I won’t.

    http://carfreebaltimore.com/?p=1777

  3. 3

    You’ve actually seen cars getting pulled over on 3rd Ave when they’re not supposed to be on there? I never have, and my commute runs along 3rd Ave every day.

  4. 4

    A truly free American would CHOOSE to sit in traffic for hours with his HUMMER idling.

  5. 5

    re 1: “I could make a mother-in-law joke here, but I won’t.”

    You could re-imagine mothers-in-law. Then you’d be at the top of your game — just like the visionaries and their plans for old roads.

  7. 7

    Sometimes The (new) Atlantic doesn’t suck.

    Wages for the young are falling, student debt is rising, and twentysomethings are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the country. This kind of economic uncertainty works as an anchor on national migration.
    http://www.theatlantic.com/bus.....re/254349/

    We also need people spending to revive the economy and the same issues that this article explores in terms of young people moving applies to spending in general. We’ve gots to get those wages up.

  9. 9

    It’s not that I have anything against cars or freeways. I’m a product of the 60’s and early ’70s, and as a teenager I would spend long hours driving, “with no particular place to go” (as recounted in the Chuck Berry song).

    And freeways were a necessary transition in mid-size cities where the existing road network was at it’s peak, mass transit didn’t exist, and it would take far too long to build it.

    But things have changed. Heck, they changed about thirty years ago, but that’s another story. While we should have been using Freeways as a transition period whle we built a true mass transit system (to go on-line by the early 1980’s), we did nothing.

    In the meantime cities have grown considerably (many have doubled in size since 1970). Over the years we’ve tweaked the system this way and that, using HOV lanes, reversable lanes, peak-commuting tolls in some places, metered freeway ramps, etc. Drivers and their employers have made changes too – in the early 1980’s “flex time” was a new concept, but now most employers use some version of it. Other adjustments have included switching to four ten-hour days, and tele-commuting. But we are still very near our maximum capacity, and we need to be implementing alternatives NOW.

    But now the timing is off, and we have to do many things all at once, since we didn’t do them when we should have done so. Now we have to build mass transit while we replace aging highway infrastructure such as the 520 bridge. And don’t forget the entire I-5 roadbed was supposed to last fifty years at no more than 20% of today’s traffic load, it’s now AT LEAST ten years over-due for replacement.

    But some still argue that we need only to spend hundreds of millions of dollars adding an additional lane here and there, and everything’s fine. If these guys owned an airline, it would be flying DC-3’s with duct tape holding large portions of it together.

  10. 10

    @9 sorta…

    I am convinced that we need to build more mass transit, mostly rail. I’m not convinced that we need to continue to keep up all our highways and continue to worry about added capacity.

    American’s are driving less and that trend will accelerate as gas prices remain high and as baby boomers retire. A large portion of the funding to keep up our roads come from state and federal gas taxes and reduced driving and increased gas milage mean there’s going to be a lot less money to keep the freeways fixed up.

    It’s probably time to re-evaluate what needs to be fixed up, what needs to be taken down, and time to move into a managed contraction as far as roads go.

  11. 11

    A woman wants insurance companies to help defray the cost of birth control pills and she’s a slut and a prostitute. A guy wants a vasectomy and not only is it covered by his insurance, he gets FREE PIZZA. Fuck yeah, it’s good to be a boy in America.

    http://www.businessweek.com/ar.....-vasectomy

    Go under the knife, get a slice. That’s the March Madness-themed promotion from the Urology Associates of Cape Cod (UACC), which is offering a free pizza with every vasectomy scheduled by patients who visit one of its three clinics during the tournament. The $500-$700 surgery (which the association says is covered under most insurance plans) affords men the chance to have a safe method of sterilization—and a free pie from Surf’s Up Pizza and Seafood in Sandwich, Mass. Bloomberg Businessweek talked to UACC urologist Dr. John Homa, about the procedure, the promotion and if anyone who’s just had their whoosit chopped really wants to eat a pizza.

  12. 12

    After discovering the convenience of taking the bus to the UW, I never parked there again.

  13. 13

    I love the Light Rail. What a stress free way to get downtown. Love it. Can’t wait until it goes to the U-District.

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