fix seattle's transportation problem

I started becoming ambivalent about this goal as I spent time thinking about it and concluded that 1. there aren’t that many bad problems with traffic IN Seattle. Most of them involve suburban commuters coming in and out of the city. And 2. the traffic is really a testimony to the attractions of the city. The real “problem” is the lack of options to getting stuck in traffic at certain times, but to be honest, living and working in Seattle, I rarely have a real problem with traffic.

Finally, with the defeat of the monorail, I feel like the voters have spoken and said, basically, they care more about low taxes than congestion. So who cares. I still love Seattle, but I hate our politics.

A good hour of informative talk radio (and some highway backed bickering) about the monorail.

I’m a college educated newspaper reader and I couldn’t make heads or tails of this Seattle Times article on the Monorail:
A crowded monorail may still fall short of rider goal

1. One problem is it doesn’t seem to state what the objective ridership goal is. Can you find the numbers stated in the article?
2. Is the article saying a 2 train monorail won’t be able to hit those ridership numbers, or just that the trains will be full?
3. Is the article saying we need to subsidize transit to hit ridership goals?
4. Why not charge more for the monorail (since it will be crowded) than we do for buses (which are not)?
5. Is the conclusion of the design commission that we need more money for a bigger monorail, or that the monorail shouldn’t be built, as it will be too crowded?

I’m confused. It seems like the moral of the story is the monorail will be such a success it will be highly utilized, but perhaps not as highly utilized as if it was twice as big (which seems obvious). However, the editorial slant of the Seattle Times and the political agenda of the Seattle bureaucrats make this story hard to tease out.

I challenge you, read this article and tell me what it says to you!

Signs of life for the monorail:

• a kind P-I column from Susan Paynter
• the 43rd District Democrats voted 33-16 to support the shorter plan
• the 36th District Democrats voted 15-1 in favor
• a heck of an idea from the City Comforts blog – get the Monorail board to promise to resign en masse should the shorter line be approved, thus ridding the board of appointed members and opening the board to elected representatives (throw in commitments from incompetent staff to resign as well and you have yourself a deal!)

Take a listen to the first 30 minutes of this Weekday show with Richard McIver and Dwight Pelz. That’s your choice folks – two people who basically argue that we have all the vision we need as far as transportation goes – we just need to stay the course. 2 monorail haters who don’t even deign to explain to voters why we don’t get what we voted for, but instead will get what our elected officials see fit to provide. 5 separate transit authorities operating in the city, and not a single one of them controlled by the city. That is regional planning for you – no accountability – no solutions – no mass transit. No problem?

I’ll vote for Pelz just because I think it is disgusting that folks try and serve more than 2 terms on the city council. Richard McIver deserves a break from the travails of public service – and a chance to reflect on the intentions of the voters. And I hope Pelz reaps a whirlwind for his anti-urban regionalism next time he runs.

I like to try and practice “lateral thinking” when I encounter a problem. It seems obvious to me that the commonly held position on how to solve a problem is almost never right, since if it was, the problem would likely already be solved. So I’m a big believer of trying to see a problem from a different perspective, rather than recycling the received wisdom.

So over the last few weeks of thinking about transit in Seattle, I’ve been challenging myself to think: “Is there really a problem with transportation in Seattle and if so, what is it?”

This isn’t a rant – I’ll just share my mental experiences so far:

1. Like many problems, when I focused on it for a bit, I found I didn’t really think it was that bad of a problem. For all the expense of the solutions, I’m starting to think the problem is being overblown. In a lot of cases, doing nothing may be a better solution than doing something expensive and ineffective.

2. Walking and cycling are really nice ways to get around. It would be even nicer if you could walk and ride on paths without cars going past. Why not take every 4th street in Seattle neighborhoods and close it to traffic, reclaim the street as a pedestrian/cyclist boulevard. And how about getting more sidewalks in the city, once you look, it is amazing how many parts of town lack sidewalks.

3. Isn’t the problem too many cars? Shouldn’t any solution basically look to eliminate the use of cars by single drivers as a means of getting around the city. I think a lot of good ideas could come from gypsy cab services that pick up multiple passengers, bus stops that tell you when the next bus is coming, and entertainment and perks on transit (free newspapers in the morning, a cocktail and stand up comedy on the way home). What if all the flexcars were jaguars?

4. People have unreasonable expectations. How long should it take to get from Seward Park to Ballard? It’s over 10 miles. Is it reasonable to want to get there faster than 20 miles per hour? No. So plan on a half hour trip.

5. Going to a farmer’s market rules.

Try the experiment of cataloging your traffic woes. My bet is that the problem isn’t as bad as a lot of the rhetoric around the problem.

The city council just joined the mayor in pulling the plug on the monorail. It was a unanimous vote.

Does it matter to voters that 4 public votes said “build the monorail” and the city council did little to nothing to make it so. The City was charging the monorail fees for the use of Seattle Center as well as millions in sales tax, while funding Sound Transit to the tune of $50 Million.

“I think it’s a sad day for not just the monorail supporters, but for all mass transit supporters in the city,” Councilman Nick Licata told The Associated Press. “I would have loved to see the monorail succeed.” He just wasn’t willing to fight for it – and caved into the forces of regionalism. Licata said he hopes a regional transit authority can be formed to pay for some other mass transportation project.

“It was a great dream, but the facts are in, and it’s time to stop the squandering of millions on pie-in-the-sky projections. It’s over,” Councilman Richard McIver said in a statement the council released after the vote.

Here’s how I see the interplay of Seattle’s traffic woes and the surrounding region. Cities are built through human action, dedication, and human ingenuity. Great cities require great effort. Cities literally defy nature. We carve out these cities from their natural surroundings. Walls have forever demarcated the boundaries of cities, and even without walls, our cities have edges where the human effort dissipates and the built city stops. But at the edges of the city, human habitation continues. There have always been those who live outside the city walls: shut out in slums, separated by vocation, removed by culture. The city attracts people with it’s economic, cultural, and defensive benefits. The wall separates those who gain access to those benefits and those who are excluded.

In the modern city, suburbs have grown up around cities as a means to enjoy the economic or cultural benefits of the city without contributing to the tax base. Land use laws in suburbs effectively protect against city “problems” (like density, multi-family housing, crowded schools, mass transit), but the suburbs remain close enough to the urban core to get access to jobs, culture, and human conviviality.

The only great transportation solution for any city is a urban transportation system. Any regional transportation system that dissipates the benefits of the city outside its borders will only further the dissipation of the city’s greatness. Seattle should build a transportation solution for Seattlites. The choked roads in and out of the city are a tribute to the attractions of Seattle. Gridlock outside the city gives commuters the time to contemplate why they live and work where they do. The transportation system we build within Seattle should be a monument to our city’s character and ambitions, not another way to allow suburbs to siphon the dynamism of Seattle.

Great cities have always stood apart from their surroundings and endowed their citizens with gifts that set them apart from other cities. We do not need to solve the region’s transportation problems to solve Seattle’s transportation problems. We need Seattlites to use all our creativity and ingenuity to solve them for ourselves. It’s the only way we’ll find a great solution. Is it any surprise that those lining up against the monorail are preaching solutions that focus on regionalism or look to the state legislature as the ultimate determiner of what sort of transportation the city ought to have? We’ve seen this before – it’s how we got 2 stadiums built side by side through regional fiat over the objections of our city’s voters.

Until Seattle stands on its own, mentally, fiscally, aesthetically, we’ll be enervated with mediocrity and governed from afar.

The P-I called the Mayor’s bluff on his temper tantrum, canceling the right of way and demanding a 5th revote. Has anyone enquired whether the Mayor has legal authority to cancel the right of way agreements?

I think the Mayor has dug himself a real hole here. If the monorail declines the invitation to revote the whole package, it will be interesting to see how his office chooses to proceed.

I was reading an article about the monorail today, and while looking at the attached map, I found myself thinking – why not run this sucker along the alignment taken up today by the viaduct. Has anyone looked at that option?