Will 12th Avenue Streetcar Have You Doing Loops?
CHS reminds us there's another person we met at the Google meetup the other day: Tri from the Group for the Loop and theColumbia City blog. The City Council has been looking at either 12th Avenue or Broadway as a streetcar route, but the Group for the Loop refuses their false dichotomies, man!
We should really get Tri to hold forth in one of our Seattlest editorials, but in a nutshell, here's what we remember him telling us at the meetup. First of all, as you can see from the graphic (click to make it big), the streetcar would run in a loop north up 12th Avenue and then south down Broadway, before heading back to 12th and then down South Jackson.
One thing the loop does is remove the need for decision about 12th or Broadway, which, it being Seattle, could keep us at the consensus table for the next quarter of a century. Also, as we understand it, it takes up less space to run the streetcar one way down a street, and it pencils out (construction-wise) as cheaper to do.
The Group for the Loop has been lobbying the City Council with their plan--they met with Richard Conlin earlier this week, and are sitting down with bus-pushing Tom Rasmussen today. We're asking the Mayor what he thinks--we'll add that if he gets back to us. Tri thinks they're getting some traction, and we have to say, if he's right about the costs, a loop seems like something we could get behind. Anyone got a better idea?
