I’d like to see more genuine mass transit BY RAIL, & not more smelly lumbering busses necessitating a mind-bogggling amount of connections with nowhere to wait out of the rain & cold. The Metro, the Tube, anyone? Europeans have the train thing all figured out–WT* is wrong with us, anyway? Granted, our geography poses some challenges, but some sophisticated engineering, though expensive initially, would prove to be a great investment. Another beef I have, with the rail service already in place, is that the hours it runs are laughable. If you’re not at the platform precisely at whatever hour it leaves last (5:45 or whatever, & that’s after taking a lumbering smelly old bus to get there), you’re either stuck in downtown for the night or facing cab fare home–in my case 20+ miles–kinda defeats the point of mass transit. Is it any wonder people who work jobs with more demanding hours or offbeat schedules are still driving their cars?

I’d devote the lion’s share of funds to rails, with side spurs to central points in our infamous city of villages, with fast & light busses circulating every no longer than every 2o min, even less at peak times, and of course, 24 hours for the rails & spurs.

I’d then devote a truly modest amount to repairing & maintaining the surface streets & interstates.

What really cracked me up about Prop 1 was the pledge to add “more lanes” to freeways. Yeah, we see how well that’s worked so far–a couple miles on drivers are forced back into the mainstream because the lazy-man’s illusory way of “expanding freeways” so far hasn’t involved expanding the roadbeds (where even possible). I suppose I needn’t mention how those brief miles of “additional lanes” attract the really aggressive drivers who think they’ll just sprint around traffic until forced back into it. I’m sick of them. “Yes, YOU first, you MUST be FIRST, after all,” I often find myself muttering at them.

Ah well. I’d really rather get out of traffic altogether & have a nice ride along the coast on a fast, efficient train in the morning. Will Puget Sound EVER catch up to the rest of the world? (But not LA, which is where we seem to be headed now).

Of course, the kind of people who comment 1 year before the vote tend to be transit zealots.

I thought the majority of them were good, but a lot of people disagreed.

Are there any others?

Given monorail’s history in this city, I think the chances of its approval are close to zero, sadly. They just got through selling off the SMP’s property acquisitions!

Also, Ron Sims’ BRT initiatives are supposed to handle Ballard – Downtown – West Seattle. I’m not the biggest fan of BRT, but they’re probably just as fast or faster than the streetcar.

Let’s try it again.

Look an extention of the SLUT to Udistrict and up Capitol to First Hill and down to the ID and the waterfront will give this city a nice little circle and pave the way for a Udist to Fremont to Ballard street car and maybe something from Ballard to QA to DT and from DT to West Seattle (probably not street car) via California Ave.

There are many many options.

And really I just wanted to show people this http://frostfireseeds.com/amount-of-space-required-to-transport-the-same-amount-of-people-by-car-bus-or-bicycle

At the same time, what I was trying to point out is that there are significant technical issues with how a Seattle-only measure would apply to Sound Transit, and somebody who knows more about the legal aspects of this than me should sound off.

If we could get it on the ballot for 2008 and it’d pass, that would be awesome, but some how I think we’d need heavy modifications the likes of which you have described: a smaller light rail package and more buses/sounder extensions.

At very least, if we could get a northgate-only portion on the ballot paid for by Seattle tax-payers, that could get momentum enough that it would not destroy rail.

But we need something to pass and soon, and I’m not sure I 100% trust the Sierra Club to get a ballot proposal this time around.