This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
WSDOT’s own Pt. Defiance bypass project got the biggest share of $30M in federal grants that were doled out today. The project is “underfunded by as much as $14.9M” before the grant came out, so presumably this will help close that gap and further savings can be found to make up the rest.
Virginia also got a few million to improve service between DC and Richmond.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
I think the streetcar needs to be put in proper context. It’s one of those rare modern transit systems that gets running in advance of population growth. It was built to accommodate an South Lake Union residential and office population that isn’t there yet.
Transit and population growth have a chicken-and-egg relationship. In building the streetcar, Nickels-Vulcan stepped in to break the deadlock by saying, in effect, “screw it, let’s just put a chicken there and an egg will show up eventually.” And they did, because they had the will and the money to do so. The population (the egg) is coming. It may take a bit longer because of the current housing slump, but it’s coming.
However, the problem, if I can extend the metaphor, is that in the interim you have a somewhat useless chicken sitting there in downtown Seattle for all to see. And so people naturally ask, “why did our elected officials put that chicken there? And while we’re at it, what other chickens are they talking about building? Do we really need them?”
This line of thinking naturally makes people chicken-averse, and as such, undermines support for the whole chicken-building enterprise known as “Sound Transit.” And that’s a problem. Voters see empty streetcars moving back and forth on Westlake, and wonder why we spent money on them (never mind that the money was minimal, mostly raised from private funds, and didn’t involved ST at all).
Do I think this is a huge problem that’s going to kill Proposition 1 in November? No, I don’t. But it is worth considering when starting these kinds of projects.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Atrios writes:
One of the weirdly absurd things in Philadelphia is how relatively few people actually take public transit to the stadium/arena complex. It is by design, as they’re all in one place at the southern end of the city, surrounded by massive amounts of parking, and at the intersection of the two major highways going into the city
I lived in Philly when the new sports arenas were being debated. Several awesome sites were debated in and around downtown, especially for the new Phillies stadium. In the end, parochial decisions dominated: UPenn didn’t want all that traffic near their campus, and residents of Chinatown not unreasonably objected to having a good chunk of their neighborhood demolished. So two new stadia were built South of the city, right in the parking lots of the old stadia.
It was a missed opportunity. On the other hand, it sure is expensive to build infrastructure to support a downtown Stadium. Not sure Philly had the resources to pull it off.
Proposition 1 will be featured on KUOW’s The Conversation at 1pm today (Wednesday). If you have time, you might want to place a phone call or send in an email. One reason KUOW is great is because it offers a free, live stream.