Business Week asks the question. They mention the obvious reasons: crowding, energy costs, and standard of living. But they also point out that some “big city glamour” is involved in building transit, and that even places like Charlotte, Phoenix and Los Angeles are building Subways.
Except Seattle is special… But not as special as Rennes, France a city of 212,000 with density similar to Seattle’s and a full-fledged subway line.
If Rennes can build a subway, why can’t Seattle?
I hope your tongue is firmly planted in cheek – Rennes can have a subway because there’s one line and it’s less than six miles long.
We don’t even have one line that’s 6 miles long…
Yeah I was thinking more along Michael’s sentiment. But you’re right, 5.8 miles isn’t really that much. Still, it’s more than we have today.
I was trying to point out that other “boom towns” are building transit systems.
We’ll have a line close to that when ULink gets built.
From UW to Pioneer square will be subway, about 5+ miles long.
Charlotte and Phoenix are building light rail like us, no?
@ anon above – yeah, even longer than that. the central link will be a subway from King Street all the way to NE 75th Street around Green Lake.
Probably because they don’t ask their citizens for a vote on whether or not to approve the project in addition to the fact that most Europeans are very pro transit anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish we were building heavy rail but Rennes’s line is on the absolute shortest end of non-novelty lines (e.g. the Seattle Center monorail). Let’s put a line about that long in Seattle with the following assumptions: no duplication of the existing or soon to exist light rail lines but it needs to cross as many high-traffic transit lines as possible (the light rail line, the freeway station, the transit tunnel, the SLUS), and its midpoint should be close to some place that lots of people go during the week (like the downtown commercial core).
One route for that line would look something like this: http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=50E974DE24D554AB!105&encType=1
That’s actually nicer than I initially thought when I made that flip post before bed but still doesn’t reach the old streetcar suburbs around and north of the ship canal (or the south end of Lake. It still doesn’t provide alternatives to crossing the bridge choke points on roads – which is something that would really drive ridership.
I suppose you could run a line only north or south but that seems like such a waste…
Also, I don’t think LINK is a good comparison. It has far too few and too separated stops even if it is subterranean. Now, if they were going to build a station about every third of a mile and give it five minute headways during peak ridership, THAT would be a subway in all but the third rail.
And I meant to say “(or the south end of Lake Washington).”
Charlotte and Phoenix are building light rail. We are building a 3.15 mile extension to a downtown-airport line and that’s it. Nothing more than that.
And it won’t go to NE 75th unless we extend it, it’s not going past montlake as the plan current is.
My point is not light-rail versus heavy rail. The difference is not well-defined anyway, and Light Rail is more flexible than heavy-rail with electrified third rails.
My point is that little towns like Rennes can find the will and money to build these things, huge sprawling regions like Charlotte and Phoenix can, but Seattle votes it down.
As Brian implied only the politicians need to find the will in Rennes and transportation funding is much diversified over there anyhow. Sure, there’s still tension between roads and rails but both get built when they are felt to be necessary. Rennes ALSO has a big ole ring freeway which is pretty comparable to anything around a similarly sized American metro region, for instance. And like I said, the line is short, short, short and therefore, cheap, cheap, cheap (for a subway). The city of Seattle could probably build a subway line of that length or even twice that length with its own money (if it survived the recall votes, of course)!
As for larger issues, they get voted down because “we” (speaking of the whole region) are almost ridiculously balkanized and our politicians are not exactly visionaries. Both sides of the “no” campaign played on, in the end, class envy to get the job done. Don’t subsidize the dead-eyed, earth-destroying suburbanites as they widen existing roads (also: mix in some lies about the cross base freeway) and don’t subsidize a toy train system that only benefits those who already live in Seattle proper (also: mix in some lies about the cost for the whole package). So, we get nothing. But you already know this.
My favorite:
Stockholm Metro area
pop ~ 1.8 million
Stockholm Metro
7 lines
began 1950
67 miles
100 stations
over 1 million daily riders (round trip, no less!)
However, each line branches many times to different termini, so there are actually 10 discreet “endpoints”
Seattle needs a subway system and we should stop f*cking around and get one. It needs to link in from the furthest reaches of the bus lines in the north east and south. Can you imagine how it will ease up traffic? I lived in NYC and the subway was a well-oiled, reliable miracle. Even with the occassional police actions, it was still better than the BS bus routes that run every half hour or sometimes hour, and don’t fully serve areas like fed way and kent, where a lot of people commute in to Seattle for work.