Comments on: News Roundup

By: Mark Dublin

Mark Dublin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:53:03 +0000

Question for KUOW- how reliable are I-5, I-405, and I-90?

By: Chris Stefan

Chris Stefan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:48:22 +0000

Blue Swan, I don’t get it, you seem to not like conventional rail (even when it is modern HSR) but you advocate for things like maglev which cost substantially more than proven HSR technology for similar speeds, aren’t compatible with the existing rail network, and are subject to the same criticisms you level at conventional rail.

Furthermore your critiques of the environmental impacts of rail apply just as much to highways if not more as the right of ways tend to be wider, the noise impacts are continuous, and they generate a far greater pollution and visual impact.

By: publicadministrator

publicadministrator — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:44:18 +0000

When I was in NYC I found this to be more helpful:

http://www.hopstop.com/?city=newyork

By: publicadministrator

publicadministrator — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:38:52 +0000

The underground Berkeley BART station has a bicycle corral. It’s not staffed but is in plain sight of the ticket agent’s booth.

By: Oran Viriyincy

Oran Viriyincy — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:03:34 +0000

Have you tried Google Transit? Seems to work pretty well. Actually there’s a link to it from the MTA homepage.

KC Metro’s website is still behind its regional peers TriMet and Translink.

By: Blue Swan

Blue Swan — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:48:45 +0000

Here’s something that amazed me. I’m taking a trip to NYC where I haven’t been for 3 years (living in puget sound since 1986). I was wondering about taking a Queens bus from JFK airport so I looked up the MTA (New York’s ‘Metro’) website.

WHAT A JOKE! This site is like something a skate punk would have built in 1996! No, I take that back…a skate punk would be EMBARASSED to put up such a site for one one of the world’s biggest transportation systems!

http://www.mta.info/

There’s no trip planning! The KC Metro site is like something from the planet Remulus 3 compared to this thing!

By: Oran Viriyincy

Oran Viriyincy — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:55:50 +0000

I used Firefox on Windows and now use Safari on Mac. Safari on Windows is garbage. Firefox on Mac is clunky.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:19:28 +0000

I didn’t do anything. And I hate Safari; I’d rather use IE, but will forever stick with Firefox.

By: Robert Cruickshank

Robert Cruickshank — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:45:41 +0000

Could be. Although there’s supposed to be a strict wall of separation between the newsroom and the editorial board at a newspaper, that’s begun to break down this decade, and in recent years it seems the Seattle Times has been part of that.

Of course, the general bias of most reporters is that transit has a higher bar to jump, has a stricter standard to meet than other infrastructure projects, including roads. I see this all the time with reporting on high speed rail in California. This decade, newspapers have become defenders of the status quo and generally tend to report skeptically on efforts to introduce something new.

Transit is an easy target for reporters not just because of the above factors, but because it is seen as fringe and new, it is perceived to have fewer defenders and therefore offers reporters a good chance to generate “omg look at what government is doing” outrage.

By: Oran Viriyincy

Oran Viriyincy — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:30:07 +0000

If the coffee’s any good and provide free Wi-Fi.

By: Oran Viriyincy

Oran Viriyincy — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:26:34 +0000

I have to wonder if it’s more the Seattle Times editorial board’s direction and the papers owners’ agenda than Lindblom’s.

By: Robert Cruickshank

Robert Cruickshank — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:20:50 +0000

I have to wonder about Lindblom’s agenda here. Reading that article doesn’t suggest to me it was a “cost overrun” as is traditionally understood – the project’s cost ballooned and could not be completed within the original budget. Lindblom didn’t really get into the weeds about what the utility upgrades were, whether they were optional or not, whether they were related to the project or not. So he’s taking a separate cost and spinning it as a “cost overrun” which doesn’t strike me as warranted by the evidence he’s presented.

He has an odd anti-transit bent in his articles, taking fairly normal and routine things and making them look like huge problems that everyone should be freaked out about (length of walkway at Sea-Tac station, ORCA card monitoring, now this). Then again, the Seattle Times isn’t exactly known for prizing accuracy over spin favorable to the editorial board among its reporters, otherwise Emily Heffter wouldn’t have a job.

PS: I’m up here in Seattle this week, and although I was a regular Metro user for about 7 years earlier this decade, the ORCA card and One Bus Away are godsends that have revolutionized the rider experience. Amazing stuff.

By: Oran Viriyincy

Oran Viriyincy — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:48:26 +0000

If you enter 11:00 pm as the departure time it’ll say “Trip not possible”.

By: litlnemo

litlnemo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:22:40 +0000

Thanks for fixing it!

Tim, in Safari 4.0.3 for me it just broke at the question mark near the beginning, but the rest of it did not break. I didn’t check it in Firefox.

Incidentally, I don’t get the “#20007–Trip not possible” that Blue Swan got.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:08:54 +0000

I would hate having my bus smell like coffee.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:07:12 +0000

Weird, mine breaks at each ampersand.

By: litlnemo

litlnemo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:29:34 +0000

Please don’t paste long URLs like that into a comment. It forces the browser window to become too large for my monitor, and now I have to scroll right on the whole page. You can use an HTML “a href
tag to hide the long URL. Thanks!

(Not a blog admin, just a reader who hates having to scroll to the right to read posts. Admins, any chance you can edit that message to put the URL in a link so it won’t stretch the page?)

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:09:20 +0000

Good question about land area – Midway field near Chicago is located on a square mile section – 640 acres. Figure a 100′ row for rail and that would be the equivalent of about 53 miles of rail length. I suspect, but couldn’t quickly find the answer, that Seatac is much larger in land area. Boeing Field obviously smaller. Portland somewhere in between.

So, likely the land area devoted to rail travel say between Seattle and Portland is similar, if not less, than the land area devoted to air travel between both points.

In both cases, rail or air, these areas devoted to travel serve other markets too.

The impacts you list can of course be mitigated, just as the impacts of airports can be mitigated too. When either type of facility is constructed, these factors are addressed and mitigation occurs. Saying that these “detriments” are “never considered” is of course false.

By: NSBill

NSBill — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:01:39 +0000

I think this was also well documented on the movie Singles for the “Supertrain”, so it’s a shame they couldn’t have thought of this too. :)

By: Mike Skehan

Mike Skehan — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:11:25 +0000

Bad idea! There’s little difference between a bike and a pipe bomb, except for the arrangement of pipes and what’s in them.