80% of SkyTrain’s ridership first use a bus to get to the metro and the percentage of people using public transit has stagnated at 11% for almost two decades!

SkyTrain’s operating costs are about double of that of Calgary’s LRT system and Calgary’s C-Train carries more people!

Gerald Fox, a noted US transit experts claims that no SkyTrain has ever passed public scrutiny in the USA and all SkyTrain’s built to date were all private deals with minimal public input.

They pulled the equivalent of Seattle’s foaming anti-lrt monorail activists: they went out and bought themselves some “faster and quicker to deploy” BRT buses, at a cost of $800k each. (check that figure)

And they took the Kemper, Niles, Bundy, Washington Policy Center and Discovery Institute model (meaning very little new rights of way or infrastructure).

And guess what the result was? Empty buses stuck in traffic. The conservative anti-transit dream. Proof that socialist social engineering will always fail (while doing their best to hide the fact that BRT scam was actually their idea)

Best part came when the buses started catching on fire, and the whole program was scrapped. The perfect ending to a perfect BRT story.

How is it that John Niles, Jim MacIsaac, Richard Harkness, Doug MacDonald, Mike Ennis, Emory Bundy (should I stop now?) Kemper Freeman, Jim Vesely, John Carlson, Mark Baerwaldt, Maggi Fimia, Bruce Chapman (…no) Ted Van Dyk, Joel Connelly, Peter Sherwin, Rob McKenna, Frank Blethen, Don Padelford, Dori Monson, Bill Eager, Will Knedlik, Bruce Agnew (I could keep going, but won’t) all share one thing in common: these clowns claim BRT should be the homogenous, singular mode of transit for our remote po-dunk outpost here in Seattle.

But none of them will EVER actually put a BRT plan out for examination. Not even the insane people trying to steer the HMS Ron Simms away from that inevitable iceberg.

So, what does it tell you when hardcore Bus Rapid Transit ideologues won’t even set their product out on the shelf?

Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?

Judy Clibborn, Deb Eddy, Fred Jarrett (+other KemperCrats) – these esteemed leaders are willing to set up an entirely new elected government to subsume Sound Transit.

Why, you ask? Well, the purpose is not to expand light rail. It’s to subvert the regional consensus behind rail on behalf of a local Repub billionaire named John Stanton. A guy who pushes buses, but penly states he never takes the bus.

More importantly, our enlightened legislators are totally willing to re-make regional transportatioon governance in order to pass the lightening rod of system-wide tolling on to another elected body. Doug MacDonald and Deb Eddy say as much in public settings…but they do their best to beat around the rhetorical bushes when discussing this matter.

Hey, they saw the Elway poll which shows 70% of the public hates congestion pricing. Tell Joe Voter he gets a chip on his car, and I’ll bet you could get that number up to 90%

In Oregon, their legislature doles out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to expand light rail in the greater Portland area.

In Washington State, we have a bunch of (fake) Democratic legislators who try to find a new way each year to divert the light rail revenue stream to more freeways.

And they do it on behalf of a millionaire mall owner who hosted Karl Rove in his office, and a billionaire (big hat, no cattle) who is the #1 donor to the State Republican Party.

Ever wonder why we are so far behind here?

But hey, all these clowns need to do is pass bills which say “we shall reduce VMT”…in 30 years. Without explaining how that’s gonna happen. Or, how their big freeways and diesel buses are going to do the trick.

The eastside Democrats are especially pathetic and two-faced. At least Jim Horn told you straight up he wanted to pave the planet for Kemper and Stanton. The batch of backwards Republicrats we got now have mastered the art of tailoring their message, depending on which group they might be in front of.

I’ll tell you what: some day it’s gonna catch up to them. And it’s gonna catch up to Frank “pave the city” Chopp, too. (back in the day it was hard to track down evidence of politicians’ backwards and regressive thinking…not any more!)

Time for these old dinosaurs to hang up the towel.

I look at a place like Vancouver, where their Skytrain extensions were automatically approved by the Translink board and the Provincial government. Most of the improvements in the recent plan will be completed by 2020. Now, when will it be when we see that kind of extensive coverage that Vancouver will have by 2020?

I honestly wish we had something like that…

But in general I think I agree. Asking the voter to learn all the subtleties (did I spell that right?) seems unreasonable.

That’s the beauty of something like a federated board. These people already represent the interests of the locals – big companies aren’t buying local officials (and certainly not 15 of them at a time).

This being said, general yes/no votes for whether we should have transit, etc., aren’t a terrible idea. It’s when we have to decide the details that we get into trouble.

ST2 was definitely the proper kind of vote, but due to long build time on the first line, it was a little early.

This extends to other issues, too. I’d be very happy if all we voted on were elected officials and not referendums, school bonds, tax increases, park levies, etc, etc. I understand why it’s done though: it’s politically easier to have people tax themselves than to do the taxing from above.

Like there is about our sports stadiums, which were actually voted AGAINST but which we seem to like regardless. Any “BLAH BLAH WE DIDN’T VOTE FOR THIS WHY IS THIS BEING FOISTED UPON US” would go away once the line opens.

I kind of hope it gets built without a vote to serve as an inspiration for other cities but I’d also like to see the people of Honolulu be turned on to transit before it gets built.