You Go To Work With The Mass Transit You've Got

The Cascadia Report blog has a post today about how the existence of light rail in the region creates support for more light rail. He cites rapidly escalating support in PDX for light rail lines that run over the river and into Washington where previously public opinion opposed that kind of expansion by a 2-1 margin. After living with light rail for a while, two out of three people now support such an extension. In our own area there is increased support for inter-city light rail that has been vehemently opposed in the past.

We have to say, there is some serious rubber-necking going on every time Seattlest passes that light rail builder robot down by the airport. As much as we want to pout and complain for the 134 billionth time about the monorail (you fuckers..) it's hard not to get excited about what we are going to get. It's something, you know? We'd probably be excited by BRT at this point, particularly after it took us an hour and half to get from downtown to Wallingford last night via Metro.

It remains to be seen whether light rail in Seattle will get Seattlest to anywhere that's actually useful. We should be able to take it from the UD to downtown eventually, but the exciting thing is that once we have something in place and Joel "You can have my parking spot when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" Connely and everyone else sees how convenient and great it is we'll start boring tunnels through the seven hills to criss-cross the city with light rail. By the time it's finished we'll be hoping the platforms have Rascal access, though.