Link hasn’t opened yet, but a link car has already been tagged.
4 Replies to “Light Rail Tagged”
The worrisome part to me is that a concerned citizen called Sound Transit a few days BEFORE the tagging even happened, and was told not to worry, ST has 24 hour security.
This tells me a few things. ST doesn’t take warnings very seriously. They have poor security. And there needs to be a barrier to prevent people from climbing up, then walking down the tracks.
Sam, what kind of barrier are you talking about? The fence that’s there, maybe? The columns elevating the trackway far off the ground? These taggers went to great lengths to get up onto the trackway.
And as this is covered by insurance *and* I’m told the total cost for cleaning is in the range of $1k, it’d be silly to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on additional barriers for something that won’t happen when the train is in service – you can’t really tag a moving train!
Why can’t teenagers just stop tagging things? Can anyone even read or understand what they write (or tag)?
Because states like Washington let their funding for arts in schools go south. Back home in Texas, of all places, some cities boost funding for the arts in schools and see a nice drop in grafitti. The one high school in my home district that decided they’d slyly slip money from art into something else? Yup, tagged from here to kingdom come.
And tags are easy to read, usually. I’m surprised they haven’t brought in people to figure out the vandal based on their tag. I’m willing to guess they’re from some place like the south part of Bellevue or Tukwila.
The worrisome part to me is that a concerned citizen called Sound Transit a few days BEFORE the tagging even happened, and was told not to worry, ST has 24 hour security.
This tells me a few things. ST doesn’t take warnings very seriously. They have poor security. And there needs to be a barrier to prevent people from climbing up, then walking down the tracks.
Sam, what kind of barrier are you talking about? The fence that’s there, maybe? The columns elevating the trackway far off the ground? These taggers went to great lengths to get up onto the trackway.
And as this is covered by insurance *and* I’m told the total cost for cleaning is in the range of $1k, it’d be silly to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on additional barriers for something that won’t happen when the train is in service – you can’t really tag a moving train!
Why can’t teenagers just stop tagging things? Can anyone even read or understand what they write (or tag)?
Because states like Washington let their funding for arts in schools go south. Back home in Texas, of all places, some cities boost funding for the arts in schools and see a nice drop in grafitti. The one high school in my home district that decided they’d slyly slip money from art into something else? Yup, tagged from here to kingdom come.
And tags are easy to read, usually. I’m surprised they haven’t brought in people to figure out the vandal based on their tag. I’m willing to guess they’re from some place like the south part of Bellevue or Tukwila.