Month: October 2008

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Three men, apparently traveling to a restaurant for lunch:
A: “I always take this because the shuttle is so slow.”
B: “Yeah, it takes forever with traffic lights. I can walk faster than that thing.”
C: “We could have walked…”
A: “This is much faster than walking.”
B: “I wish we had a real subway, like Munich.”
(discussion continues about “real” subways around the world)

I really wanted to turn around and ask what they meant by “real” subway. A train? We’ll get there soon. Having more than 5 stops downtown? Ditto.

I used the bus tunnel three times today. We have a subway, and it works. I’m connected to the International district, Pioneer Square, and the stadiums all without usually having to wait for more than 2-3 minutes. There’s no traffic and it’s much faster than any other mode of transportation. The bus tunnel took quite a bit of foresight to build, and Link would be a lot more difficult and expensive without it.

As an aside, today is the first time I’ve seen the Westlake Center station (I hate shopping). It’s beautiful, and provides a nice rain-free path between Nordstrom’s and Macy’s. Actually, soon it will provide a rain-free path between the airport and Seattle Center as well.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Lance Mannion, in his lyrical way, reminds us that “Main Street,” a.k.a. Small Town America, came out of the railroad era, not the automobile era, and in doing so makes the case for pedestrian, walkable neighborhoods quite beautifully. The crux of his argument is probably familiar to anyone who reads Orphan Road, but Mannion’s post is far more charming to read than a policy paper:

The first suburbs sprang up at the end of the 19th Century and were built not off of highways but along rail lines. They were small towns that in growing grew into one another but did not lose their individual identities or economies and many of those not only still exist but still thrive as distinct towns with prospering main streets.

There’s a big difference between the sprawling subdivisions outside of Dallas and the tightly-packed tree-lined neighborhoods of the towns ringing Boston. Allen and Melrose are both technically suburbs, but the main street of one is a six-lane highway feeding into an endless series of parking lots and the main street of the other is Main Street where you can walk from Uncle Merlin’s embroidery shop to the bakery to the butcher’s to the bank to the back room of Benny’s bar—and I promise never to alliterate like that again—without getting out of earshot of your car alarm, not that it’s likely to go off, because who’s going to break into it with all those people walking around on their errands?

There are still Main Streets, and as it happens I live on one of them. Just around the corner from one anyway. Our town’s main street isn’t called Main Street but that’s what it is, with a couple of banks, the hardware store, a few restaurants, an ice cream parlor, an insurance agent’s, a barber shop, a dentist’s office, a florist, and a video store. The public library, the post office, the police station, the town hall, and the fire house are all there too.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Amtrak Bill has cleared both houses, been through conference committee, and is finally ready to hit the President’s desk, where he’ll sign it.

A separate appropriations bill will actually provide the cash. There’s lots of good stuff in there, for Amtrak nationally and for the Cascades corridor in particular.

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.

These are good ideas.

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.