Month: February 2008

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Bruce Agnew really likes to dream, doesn’t he? The man seems to think that if we just close our eyes and think really hard, we can fix our transportation problems for free. David Brewster, in response, smacks down the foot ferries concept (which I think has more merit than Brewster admits, but isn’t the cure-all that its proponents imagine).

Sorry, Bruce, there’s no magic pill we can swallow and fix our transportation problems. The only answer is to do like every other city on planet earth: spend billions of dollars on new high-capacity transit systems. It’s going to be messy, expensive, over-budget and inconvenient. It’s going to require moving mountains of earth, pouring tons of concrete, laying miles of rail, and yes, inconveniencing some people. Suck it up and deal with it.

The Seattle area has generated an obscene — almost criminal — amount of wealth in the last decade. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the plans, we just don’t always have the will to execute.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Daily flights from SoCal to SeaTac coming soon. Brilliant. Anything that gives Alaska a run for its money is OK by me.

To be honest, I’ve had generally good service (though I’ll be happier when they replace their MD-80s with wide-body 737s) from Alaska Air. But a good deal of the flying I do is home to my folks in New York and JetBlue’s the better deal for that, so I’ve gotten a bit spoiled. And I like competition.

In other news, Virgin is going to start flying SFO-to-SeaTac, which is brilliant as well.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The new Metro RapidRide buses vs. The Oscar Mayer Weinermobile

(via STB)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve been book-tagged by the catowner, and so I must respond! Sadly, the book that sits closest to me is — not transit-related — Jim Collins’ Good to Great. Here he is talking about “Responsibility Accounting”:

The idea, radical for the 1960s, was to create a system wherein every Abbott manager in every type of job was responsible for his or her return on investment, with the same rigor that an investor holds an entrepreneur responsible. There would be no hiding behind the traditional accounting allocations, no slopping funds about to cover up ineffective management, no opportunities for finger-pointing. But the beauty of the Abbott system lay not just in its,rigor, but in how it used rigor and discipline to enable creativity and entrepreneurship.

SC’s book is more interesting than mine, I must admit.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Goldy does the heavy lifting in taking down this pernicious Seattle Times op-ed. Sayeth Goldy:

Of course the real question here is why the Times is so adamant about demanding “reform” of Sound Transit, an agency that just came through its audits with flying colors, while they remain silent on the issue of reforming the Port of Seattle, an agency so arrogantly mismanaged that it has now become the target of a Justice Department investigation into allegations of criminal fraud? Now that’s what I call “a muddle.”

Read the whole thing.