Light Rail Comin'
Over the last six weeks, we scored a temp gig working for a certain, local e-retailer that possesses the planet's largest selection. On our daily jaunts to the International District, we had the chance to observe progress on the Sound Transit tunnel. With its above-ground plaza, the I.D. station is the only place in which one can leisurely peek down into the tunnel during construction.
At first, the deserted station, what with its fine layer of grey dust, looked like some post-apocalyptic infrastructure. We half expected to see crazed men in buttless chaps riding around on motorcycles down below while brandishing spiky weapons and pulling their dessicated, vanquished foes by long, heavy chains. Some days, our mochas, monitors, and offices would shake as burly, union men in orange vests drilled and pounded the ground below our effete Union Station offices. Several weeks later, some painters began refreshing the above-ground parts of the structure. The original color scheme of blue, purple (???), and pale pink was subtly altered to blue, purple, and red in a move to allegedly better reflect the predominant colors of the surrounding neighborhood. Finally, sometime around the last two weeks of July, we noticed that actual tracks of some sort were being laid. Bravo, Sound Transit!
If you haven't been down to SODO lately or ridden along the Busway, take a tour and see how capital projects should get done. While NIMBY namby-pambies and the fiscally constipated were busy killing rapid transit in our "waterside shantytown," Sound Transit has been quietly building as if arm-twisting, skull-busting civic progress--and the lowest-bid concrete that it is founded upon--was going out of style. Vast quantities of our money are being spent lavishly and, we hope, somewhat haphazardly on a major transit project that will help give our provincial keysters something resembling a civilized and world-class manner of speedy urban transport.
