Results tagged “masstransit”

In a 6-3 split vote yesterday, the City Council approved the idea of expanding the city's streetcar system. All new lines would run north of Jackson Street: one leading up into Fremont, another into the U District, a third along the Waterfront, and the final along Broadway in Capitol Hill. (Here's the map.) Of course, as Councilman McIver pointed out, "we ain't got no money" yet, and the plans don't mean a whole lot until the funding comes into place.

"You know what I have to say, based on my last couple bus rides? I'm so glad I don't do speed anymore. And that's all I have to say about that."

By coincidence, it was while we were sitting in the over-crowded number 14 bus on the way to work when we came across this gem of an article in the : "Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund; Loan From Mass Transit Is Urged." Our sneering disbelief was interrupted by being smacked in the face by the laptop bag of the guy standing next to our seat in the aisle; the 14 is standing room only by our stop, the third on the line, from about 8 a.m.-10 a.m.

The last time we went to see Rick Steves at Town Hall, he was arguing how important it was for "regular Americans" to get out and see the world, to find out how other countries work, how other people see the U.S., or what really useful mass transit looks like.

One of the oldest jokes in the book is at the expense of the Sixth Amendment: how can twelve people who couldn't get out of jury duty be counted as your peers? Juries, after all, are populated by the unemployed and retirees--people who don't have to actually for a living.

Coming home from work on the bus last night, we got to thinking about how even getting to vote on a light-rail package this year is going to be an uphill fight. The dire prospects for light rail anytime soon pushed us to extrapolate the costs to our psyche of waiting during the ride home.

All mass transit is not created equal; here in Seattle, a city with buses and, well, nothing else, unless you're specifically talking with someone about monorail or lightrail or streetcars (you know, mass transit), when you're talking about supporting mass transit, you're talking about supporting buses.

It's cool that Drew Carey has been the face of the new Seattle MLS team, appearing at the G&D and showing up in the booth for Monday Night Football to talk about the team's plans in Seattle, but he's kind of a Cleveland guy. Couldn't we get a Seattle name that's about on par with Carey? Like....oh god there is no Seattle name on par with Drew Carey. Long live Seattle guy Drew Carey!

, columnist Joel Connelly blithely goes along with the argument that if Prop. 1--the tax-heavy plan to breathe funding-life into the Regional Transportation Improvement District (RTID)--fails, the entire region will continue tottering along to complete and total transportation infrastructure collapse.

Along with the million other words being written on this topic, we at Seattlest thought it was a good time to share some of our thinking on the Roads and Transit bill we're going to have the chance to vote on this November.

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. To the debate! First up, it's a pro-Seattle opinion.

Position 3 is the most anticipated city council race. It's an open seat, and that seems to be the only way to get new blood on the council.

Seattlest's bus home from work stopped moving as soon as we got on it yesterday evening, and didn't begin its trip up Third for half an hour or so. "They're investigating a shooting," the driver said he'd heard over his radio. The P-I waxed oddly lyrical on the backup this morning: "like sticks against a logjam." When we finally inched past Cosi it looked like a window might have been shot out and yellow tape was everywhere along with the attendant cops and fire vehicles and helicopters.

It's a little known made-up fact that soon after the Oregon Trail was blazed a group sprang up to oppose its expansion. It's the very first example of a long and illustrious tradition of opposing the expansion of transportation projects in our region that flows directly into opposing the monorail and the 520 and Viaduct replacements. So ingrained is this instinct to oppose that Seattlest found a petition signed by 15 local residents the other day asking that we please quit cutting across our front yard to get to the door of our duplex.

Seattlest has previously stated our position on light rail: we love it. We have no idea where it's going to take us, but we firmly believe that a light rail run in the hand is worth three Green Lines in the trash bin. Pay no attention to the fact that Sound Transit got a single, disappointing bid for the contract to build the Sea-Tac light rail station! Seattlest has unfortunately unearthed no new documents which would cast that single bid in a promising light, but what we can offer the mass transit enthusiast is this video of a SoDo light rail test. Let your worries drain away as you gaze in rapture at a light rail train on the move in Seattle...

The Seattle Times reported today that commute times all around Seattle are increasing. We've never heard of a metropolitan area that had decreasing commute times, so it's not exactly news that it's taking people here longer and longer to get to work (We'd love to hear of a metro area with decreasing commute times, though, so if you know of someplace please share. No fair citing Detroit during the 90's or something with similarl rapidly declining population). It is vaguely news that commute times are escalating so rapidly, but it doesn't really seem like they're keeping up with population growth, so maybe the actual story is that commute times are not advancing as fast as could be expected given all the new jobs and residents in the area and the lack of any mass transit to speak of. Despite our numerous watery choke points, maybe we had superfluous highway capacity? That could be ridiculous bullshit, of course, because we can't quickly come up with any census data that has the granularity to match the Seattle Times's 2004-2006 time frame.

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

Seattle Metro Transit is reporting that 2006 was a record year for bus ridership with 103.2 million boardings and for some reason we feel like cheering this news. Yay Metro Transit, you're competently running a bus service for the city of Seattle. Way to go. The release claims that this year's numbers represent a 4.3% increase over 2005 and attributes the increase in ridership to additional jobs in the area - The previous high-ridership mark was set in 2000 when there were also a high number of jobs in the city. We'd like to attribute it to an increased awareness of the lack of sustainability built into the automobile-based model of transportation in the region, but we also attribute our cat's energetic moods to the tides, so... The closest Metro Transit will come to saying something like that is:

We returned to the homeland over the holidays. Lugged skis and snowboards to the land of 3.2 beer, special garments, and the "Greatest Snow on Earth" only to find they had half the snow base compared to what we have here. Everything seemed backwards.

We saw an article in the Sunday New York Times about cities growing upwards that we knew someone in Seattle was going to pick up on. We thought maybe The Stranger guys might grab it and tear it up, but it looks like Knute is still looking for anti-density Mossblog fodder as he rides out his lame-duck term.

Bus Rapid Transit as an alternative to actual mass transit sucks. It's what anti-transit people offer to cities to ridicule their efforts at light rail or monorails. "You want to move people around without cars, eh? How about this ridiculous thing, then? You can't say no! It isn't a car! Look, it can move people from poor inner suburbs to job sites just as well as elevated trains and it costs nothing so in two years when you shut the hell up and buy another car we can just sell off the buses and the right of ways we grabbed and be done with it." It's like a game of transit chicken with each side wondering how the other could possibly be serious. But then, a few of these systems have actually been implemented.

Seattlest is still buzzing after the wonderful Redfin-sponsored Techcrunch meetup a few weeks ago (what can we say, free pizza goes a long way). That said, we had tempered expectations regarding Tuesday's (also Redfin-sponsored) nPost networking event, but found ourselves happily surprised by how enjoyable this pure networking gathering turned out to be.

Seattlest has a friend who absolutely refuses to credit the Onion with anything other than creating a joke form. Every time we're blown away by one of their dead-on slayings we'll send it along to him as soon as we can compose ourselves, but the response is pre-ordained. "Dumb." He appreciates what the Onion has done...in the past. Unlike Seattlest he doesn't appreciate a particularly effective implementation of the Onion formula in, say, the current issue.

Ding dong the car tax's dead. The wicked car tax is dead. Well, not officially dead like you'll get out of paying it if your car tabs come up this month, but the Monorail Project has started the process of ending the tax on June 30th, due to the fact that all those sexy properties the Project swept up to make way for the Green Line have been selling like hotcakes. Uh, hotcakes that you force private residents to sell you for a mass transit line you don't intend to build and then sell back to the public for more than what you paid for them. That kind of hotcakes.

This week Seattlest played like a transportation groupie -- former Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, Jaime Lerner was in town and we caught his public address at Benaroya Hall ("An Evening with Jaime Lerner") and then a breakfast talk ("Lessons from Curitiba") sponsored by the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle and offering a panel discussion with Patricia Chase (International Sustainable Solutions), Kevin Desmond (King County, Metro Transit), and Jim Mueller (JC Mueller).

Earlier this week kissy couples were wading through roses and red tissue paper deeper than an east coast snow dump and singles shook a tiny, lonely fist (no ring!) at it all. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - Valentine's season is in the can, finally.

, as often as we'd like. We rarely have the radio on at 9:00 p.m., but we do download their podcast.

We're skeptical over here at Seattlest that tent cities are really the best option for providing zero cost housing. Well, "providing" is not actually the right word. An empty lot is all that is "provided," but even empty lots are not so easy to come by when the prospective tenant is a tent city. They have to move from place to place, often for unclear reasons. They provide minimal shelter from the elements. There are no nearby community services. There are rarely employment opportunities nearby and access to mass transit is sometimes available, but by no means a given. Even if land could be found for something more permanent there would have to be money and a will to build structures that wouldn't be catastrophic in the event of a mild earthquake. Is it better than the street? Of course. It's not a long-term solution, though.

Q: Is the Monorail dead?