I searched for “Seattle” and it says SOV commuting
declined by 1.5% from 1990-2000.

From the CIAIII report:

There are five metro areas where drive-alone shares actually declined from 1990, whereas
there were none in the 1980-1990 period. These five were heavily distributed on the West coast. All of the losses were quite small, under one percentage point, with the exception of Seattle with a decline of about 1.5 percentage points.

So despite Portland’s early investment in rail we kicked their butt :-P

The two things that will increase transit use are of course time and money. We saw a jump in transit usage when gas prices spiked. Congestion doesn’t seem to have much of an effect because it still takes longer (twice as long) to use transit so for transit to compete it needs to become faster. The only real way to do this is dedicated ROW or at least some form of congestion management like HOT lanes. I don’t know why commuter rail has the longest average travel time but I have to suspect that it’s because of a high average distance traveled. But, it does point out the need to take direct routes, control the number of stops, offer express service, etc. Time is money.

http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/CIAIIIfacts.pdf

Spark plugs used to be a 12,000 mile interval. They go over 100,000 now. Extended life antifreeze has bumped changes from 50,000 to 100,000. Synthetic engine oil and other lubricants can more than double the time between changes and increase the life of the drivetrain. Distributor less ignitions have replaced points and condensers and the need to manually set timing and dwell. Since the adoption of Onboard Diagnostics a $100 scanner can tell you as much as a commercial grade engine analyzer system used to.

Yeah, I remember balancing dual carbs with a carb stick. That was a pain in the butt and carburetors can never deliver the performance over a wide range of conditions that an electronic fuel injections system with mass air sensor can.

Why exactly are you talking your kids to Federal Way for soccer when there’s perfectly good soccer in the city? I think you’ve choosen to make things difficult for yourself. I take my daughter to check-ups near Northgate from my house in the U-D, it’s a two block walk to the bus, get on, get off, cross the street, bob’s your uncle. Same way home. I do own two cars, so it’s not like I couldn’t drive if I felt like it.

But anyway, cars on Sunday morning are one thing, driving to Federal Way for work each day is another.

I have, however, been able to change out the radio in a car, but you know, that’s been easy for a long time.

You are correct about the Sunday buses, we can’t even get to Seattle Center until the 30 starts running about 10am, though we can get downtown.

The people for whom transit is not convenient are, by definition, not served by convenient transit. Especially if you have long commutes to far-flung places, it’s difficult to serve that with transit.

There are places where most people take transit, so you can’t simply pretend that transit si always less convenient, that’s just silly.

There’s no data to back up the service intervals extension (if actually true) means that car maintanence is cheaper, in fact, this shows that the cost of at least some maintanence has risen very dramatically:
http://www.motortrend.com/womt/112_9909_tire_inflation/index.html

I could find others but I’m lazy.

Diagnosing/fixing a carburetor with Vacuum operated emission controls, or balancing a pair of Weber carburetors; now that’s hard work!