Dan

Thu, 18 May 2006 08:41:07 -0800

The distance between what was said and what you heard is so great that I can only conclude you're a troll. Good one - You had me going for a minute there. For the next person who comes along and takes you seriously, though, here's the expanded quote: Another reason to query the tunnel--along with Mayor Nickels's other plans for automobile-related transportation fixes--is that this is a bad time to be predicting the future. We still don't know what the impact of telecommuting is likely to have on the urban-suburban commute. It's not impossible to imagine I-5, I-90 and 520 becoming increasingly unclogged at rush-hours during the next few years as more and more people stay home to work. Plus, we have no idea about what's going to happen to oil supplies. Projects like the tunnel, which won't be usable for ten or a dozen years from now, assume a future that's going to be much like today only more so--a dumb assumption in these peculiar and unstable times. Long-term transportation projects nearly always misread the future. The London Tube, for instances, fossilizes a pattern of city-traveling that was typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but has become ever more quaint and irrelevant since. The hub-and-spoke system just doesn't correspond to the way people now move around in Greater London, and if we go with Nickels's plans for Seattle I think we're likely to be saddling the Seattle of the future with our own quaintly Y2K version of city life and work. By the time these projects open they'll be impossibly outdated if gas is ten or fifteen or twenty bucks a gallon and half the people now working in offices are spending all day at computer terminals in their homes.

Peter

Wed, 17 May 2006 23:45:41 -0800

So Jon Raban thinks that the London Tube is irrelevant? Right of way public transportation is irrelevant? What a moron.

Seattlest: We'll Replace The Viaduct With A Road Despite The Vote

Dan

Peter