57 Replies to “Sunday Open Thread: Sub City New York”
The guy standing at the top of the stairs talking on his cellphone blocking the way; that was enough to make me want to smack him. Why the hell do people do things that selfish? If you need to take a call, GET OUT OF THE FLOW OF TRAFFIC.
Well trained security guards with Super-Soakers, Nerf bats, or cans of Silly String could do a lot to improve efficiency of our public transportation system.
Thank you Velo for airing a thought I’ve been carrying around for years but have had never had the nerve to express.
I feel the same way about people getting off escalators and elevators. They just stop RIGHT THERE and then get mad when they get bumped from behind.
Seattle seems to have the worst escalator etiquette than any other city I’ve been to for some reason.
I’ve seen Sidewalk Rage in action in NYC. Seattle’s still a bit laid back for that I think.
The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists.
Marshall McLuhan
Counterblast (1969), p 12
John, your continued attempt to hold back the tide never ceases to amaze me.
Same here.
Some of the latest gems from Bailo’s twitter feed:
“Will Worldwide #Nuclear #Plague rival 13th Century Black Plague? #japan #nuclear #crisis”
“Best solution now…tactical nuke W85 … 5 kiloton…. turn sand into glass, seal area… may still be too late #japan #crisis #nuclear”
“Send fuel cells to Japan to power electricity, pumps. Get mobile fuel cell units on ground ASAP.”
Suggesting the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to solve the nuclear crisis at Fukushima. Breathtaking… Where do you get this stuff, John?
Actually, the last idea was not crazy at all. Bloombox like fuel cells would be just the thing…
To put that last tweet in perspective, it was next to one saying that they shouldn’t waste the hydrogen being vented from the dying reactors, they should capture it for fuel cells.
You didn’t post my latest tweet:
“Mellow is the man; who knows what he is missing.” – L. Zep.
Does Marshall McLuhan even exist as a ghost? However, something weird has definitely happened to New York. Not only is nobody frantic, but everybody is moving in slow motion, and nobody is waving their arms and yelling. We need to investigate!
Mark Dublin
Now, all the coolest people ride the LIRR.
The subway is like so 2 centuries ago.
Yawn. NYC’s population has been increasing since 2000, after going through a decline. Lower Manhattan in particular has gotten some 50,000 additional residents in the post-9/11 era, making it a residential neighborhood again. The current New Yorkers are making a culture there, or rather several new cultures. In 50 years their culture will be remembered as much as the early- and mid-1900s cultures.
One thing that struck be the last time I was in NY in 2008, when all the Wall Street shenanigans and Madoff were being revealed. All of that is local news there, CNN is a local TV station, etc. I never thought of it that way because I’m used to thinking of national news figures as these disembodied people that would never have any direct relationship to me or any town I’d be in. But in NYC a lot of them are right there, and what they do affects the local economy and the life of the other residents. That is a culture, or at least part of one, and it’s more than just a ghost from before 1969.
50,000 residents among a metro area of tens of millions.
Big deal!
And I bet after the 2007 bust, it probably lost 500,000 residents.
Does SDOT have a breaking ground date for the new First Hill Streetcar?
Any reason for any delays?
Tim
How about emailing SDOT to ask them? You’ve asked this before and no-one knew…
Sadly, if they made this same film at Westlake Station, and slowed it to the same speed, it would be 35 minutes long.
And someone would very slowly try to sell you drugs at the end.
No-one’s ever tried to sell me drugs at Westlake, however they do have the stupid scientologists who try to give you their literature. Just another reason to prefer University St station.
You must have very different physical attributes than I do. Do you look much older than you actually are? Or perhaps wear a business suit when downtown?
I can’t seem to get 20 feet from that tunnel entrance without being solicited or harassed in one way or another.
Yes, I do know that Seattle is statistically a very safe place. But that video reminded me how beautiful it is to emerge from the subway back east without having to part an ocean of sketch (the way Westlake, Pioneer Sq, and often I.D. Station force you to).
“how beautiful it is to emerge from the subway back east without having to part an ocean of sketch”
The video won’t play on my computer, but your statement is ironic given the problems in NYC in the 1970s. Now the trends have reversed.
Seattle’s near-fully gentrified and wealthier than it’s ever been. So what’s its excuse?
Oh, right! The transit system is a perpetual put-off, so people stay in their cars, so there’s no critical mass of non-sketchy people to outnumber the sketchy ones.
Good transit -> good pedestrian environment. We need to stop making excuses for our transit lack.
I dress pretty casual. I suspect if anything I look too nerdy to sell drugs to. The only place where I’ve encountered stuff like that was on The Ave where some guy practically begged me to buy week off him, and other time when a hobo called me a fatass after I ignored his request for money. 3rd & Pike, 3rd & Pine, and the Prefontaine exit of Pioneer Square station are the only other places I’ve seen dubious characters, but they’ve never bothered me.
I have never understood why Seattle tolerates the homeless and beggars so much. They take away so much from the city and I know foreign tourists sure don’t look at them as a positive. Sure wish Mark Sidran was our Mayor!
What do you propose we do with them?
There’s also the Larouchebags that hang around there every election season.
And d.p. hits the nail on the head. Not too long ago, one of my employees had her car in the shop, so she tried taking the bus to work. The first leg of her trip was a crush-loaded 358, where she was accosted by a crackhead. When she got to work, she swore she would never again ride the bus. For the next few days she bummed rides where she could and when she couldn’t.
As soon as her van was out of the shop, she was back to driving. Uninsured and on a suspended license, of course.
Oh, the LaRouchebags are here nine months of the year. They hang out right next to my apartment on 1st & Union.
* “hitchhiked when she couldn’t”. Damn lack of an edit feature.
Cinesea: You can’t make simple begging illegal – courts have ruled time and time again that the 1st amendment right to free speech includes the right to ask for money/drugs/booze on the street. We’ve got laws against aggressive panhandling, defined as tightly as is constitutionally allowable. If you, as a pedestrian, don’t report it to the cops, then that’s your choice.
Most of the problematic panhandlers and homeless – the ones that cause disturbances – are pretty severely mentally ill, and usually drug addicted on top of it. They’ve been kicked out of every privately-run shelter in town, and we haven’t had a government framework for dealing with people too fucked-up to function for almost 3 decades now. They get thrown in jail for doing something crazy and stupid; while they’re there under the care of the county, they get a couple of doses of whatever psych meds they need and sober up. Once they’ve stood trial and done their trivial jail time for whatever trivial shit they did, they’re spit back out onto the street at 4th & James, and their mental health care is officially over. Within a few days, they’re incoherent again.
Why do we have so many more homeless than say, New York? Because here you can be homeless and stand a better chance of not freezing to death in the wintertime. The homeless in Chicago or New York have to behave, because getting kicked out of a shelter in the wintertime is damn near a death sentence.
Completely disagree, D.P.
What you call the “sketch” factor has little to do with transit quality and much to do with the fact that Seattle is one of the rare successful US cities that concentrates its social services (public and private) amid its CBD and tourist destinations. You simply will not find many missions, free clinics, halfway houses, needle exchange programs, work programs, or whatever else in Manhattan or the Loop—let alone along 5th Avenue or the Mag Mile. People like Koch, Giuliani, Rich and Dick Daley, and Bloomberg collaborated with commercial and racial interests in a way that makes South Lake Union look like Hamsterdam (and yes, that means you can call Paul Allen “Bunny”).
Third and Pike confounded me when I moved here until I spent an afternoon really looking around. Then it became clear: if you’re facing a court date or confronting homelessness or struggling with any sort of addiction or mental illness and also dependent on the state or non-profits? Third and Pike is someplace life will take you on the daily, flush against the retired couple from Topeka and the admin assistant a month out of UW. That nexus doesn’t exist in New York or Chicago.
I’m not going to get into whether it would be better to disperse existing services around the city in a way that renders the underclass and its struggles less visible to white collars and tourists at the expense of two- or three-seat rides to NA meetings and needle exchanges. But it’s plain to see that the visibility you abhor stems from a commitment to social justice, not bad transit. Which is to say that Central Link and U-Link could double their ridership estimates and you’d just be pressed up closer to the “Ocean of sketch” once you leave train so long as that ocean still has an appointment at 2nd and Bell.
Lack,
My point was, in Seattle, we’ve accepted beggars and homeless as a main part of the city. Instead of making it uncomfortable for beggars and homeless people, we accept them and try to make THEM more comfortable. If it is so easy for them to be beggars, then why would they ever want to try to NOT be begging all the time? And, then we get more and more coming here. I’d much rather my tax dollars going for something productive than helping the beggars survive on the streets and damaging the livability for the rest of us, who actually work hard being productive members of society. Enough of my tax dollars are wasted and I’d rather see them put to use creating something that benefits actual people.
“If it is so easy for them to be beggars, then why would they ever want to try to NOT be begging all the time?”
Because they could be earning $100 a day instead of $35 if they had a regular job, and they wouldn’t have to spend hours in the humiliating and frustrating act of begging.
Some 20% of the homeless are mentally ill who were thrown out of the institutions in the 80s when they were closed, and there was going to be day community services for them but that never emerged. Another percentage are veterans whom our country has done f**k all to to take care of.
For a variety of reasons, the most visibly homeless are drug/alcohol addicts who refuse the services of the shelters because they have to be sober there. Some of that is related to said lack of mental-health treatment and veterans’ services (plus the condition of Native American services), but of course some of it is unrelated. A majority of street kids (i.e., those under 18) were kicked out of their house because their parents are drug addicts or rigidly religious (i.e., they don’t want a gay kid in their house), etc. Those kids who have nice homes and families to go back to don’t remain on the street for long, because they can see that what the other street kids most want is a nice family like they have.
The other day I was on a D40LF that had a brand new variable message sign in it around the stop request light! It wasn’t showing anything yet, but I guess it needs to have the whole GPS system installed before it can work. Still, pretty cool. (Coach #3600)
This is what the sign looks like. It looks bulky and not as compact as the RapidRide signs.
It’s been on that coach since January 2010 or earlier.
Beautiful shots, but really didn’t convey the feeling of emerging from a subway stop — it felt more like nostalgia rather than revelation.
Kirkland Transit Center designers, when you put an anti-jay-walking fence running down the middle of the road, why did you make it only waist-high, so it’s easy to step over, and why did you create gaps in the fence about every ten feet wide enough for people to slip through?
And why do you think your own customers are too stupid to choose the most direct route to the their stops without stepping in front of a bus or car?
And why does it look so much sparser and less welcoming than in the picture?
“And why do you think your own customers are too stupid to choose the most direct route to the their stops without stepping in front of a bus or car?”
Years of experience.
To be clear, I’m referring to a minority of our passengers who probably aren’t “stupid” but simply don’t realize the risks they are taking.
If you penalize jaywalking, your citizens will never learn good jaywalking habits.
But like the proverb says, “teach a man to jaywalk…”
When you live in a jaywalking culture, you internalize the physics of vehicle trajectory, the rhythms of human movement, and the eye contact necessary to make it all work.
Jaywalking cities are safer places to be a pedestrian. Period.
I have no problem with Jaywalking cities and even do a bit strategic Jaywalking here. (Gasp!) The type of Jaywalking I’m talking about would probably get you a ticket in NY – It’s pretty stupid and dangerous stuff.
I think the fence is simply designed to convey a psychological message, rather than to be a physical obstruction. You’d have to talk to a 255 operator to know if it works, though.
An important trait this video highlights is the multiple, scaled points of entrance and egress at NYC subway stations rather than grandiose one-entrance station houses set back twenty feet from the street. One 14-foot-wide staircase on four corners gets people where they’re going without causing bunching at the entrances.
If only we ever could get stairwells on 4 corners of a block. Our options seem to always be “multiple entrances scattered at various inconvenient hidden mid-block locations” or “One large, obvious, but semi-inconveniently placed entrance”,
Can someone explain to me the relationship between ORCA and SLUT? For example, I have a $2.25 PugetPass and an e-purse. Were I ever to get checked on the SLUT (has anyone ever been spot checked on the SLUT?), would they care that my PugetPass doesn’t technically cover the fare?
My general understanding with ORCA is that e-purse covers whatever your pass doesn’t cover. So I think it would take 25c from your e-purse. If for some reason your pass was not considered valid, the whole $2.50 would be taken from e-purse. I see nothing on the SLUT website to suggest it works any differently than other services.
That’s how it SHOULD work, but the SLUT doesn’t have ORCA readers, so they
they simply accept ORCA as a flash pass and assume you paid on another leg of your journey.
ORCA’s marketshare, so to speak, is so low at this point that they don’t care if they lose fares over it. If Metro ever stops issuing transfers, and ORCA takes off, then they’ll probably install readers.
Until SLUT gets proper readers, they’ll probably accept the cards as flash passes. What the official site says: “ORCA cardholders can show their card as proof of payment on the Seattle Streetcar.” I think they assume most people are transferring from a Metro bus, so they’ve already paid in a sense (even though technically the system has no idea unless a card is tapped).
Hamburg Germany is proposing a 3.5 mile 100M Euro aerial cable car. To connect their “Red Light District”.
In the shadow of an overpass in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle lurks a giant one-eyed troll
Other note worth items I can remember are the hat and boot down in Georgetown and the wierd restaurant building that used to be west of the Seattle Center parking garage. Of course now there’s EMP. And then there’s the Lincoln Toe Truck which I haven’t seen in some time. And there used to be a small plane on the roof of the Renton Holiday Inn until the FAA made them take it down. What else?
Animation of St. Paul Minnesota’s extension of Light Rail. Nicely done.
The guy standing at the top of the stairs talking on his cellphone blocking the way; that was enough to make me want to smack him. Why the hell do people do things that selfish? If you need to take a call, GET OUT OF THE FLOW OF TRAFFIC.
Well trained security guards with Super-Soakers, Nerf bats, or cans of Silly String could do a lot to improve efficiency of our public transportation system.
Thank you Velo for airing a thought I’ve been carrying around for years but have had never had the nerve to express.
I feel the same way about people getting off escalators and elevators. They just stop RIGHT THERE and then get mad when they get bumped from behind.
Seattle seems to have the worst escalator etiquette than any other city I’ve been to for some reason.
I’ve seen Sidewalk Rage in action in NYC. Seattle’s still a bit laid back for that I think.
Marshall McLuhan
Counterblast (1969), p 12
John, your continued attempt to hold back the tide never ceases to amaze me.
Same here.
Some of the latest gems from Bailo’s twitter feed:
“Run from disaster, to places that are non localizing. http://spifflines.com”
“Will Worldwide #Nuclear #Plague rival 13th Century Black Plague? #japan #nuclear #crisis”
“Best solution now…tactical nuke W85 … 5 kiloton…. turn sand into glass, seal area… may still be too late #japan #crisis #nuclear”
“Send fuel cells to Japan to power electricity, pumps. Get mobile fuel cell units on ground ASAP.”
Suggesting the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to solve the nuclear crisis at Fukushima. Breathtaking… Where do you get this stuff, John?
Actually, the last idea was not crazy at all. Bloombox like fuel cells would be just the thing…
To put that last tweet in perspective, it was next to one saying that they shouldn’t waste the hydrogen being vented from the dying reactors, they should capture it for fuel cells.
You didn’t post my latest tweet:
“Mellow is the man; who knows what he is missing.” – L. Zep.
Does Marshall McLuhan even exist as a ghost? However, something weird has definitely happened to New York. Not only is nobody frantic, but everybody is moving in slow motion, and nobody is waving their arms and yelling. We need to investigate!
Mark Dublin
Now, all the coolest people ride the LIRR.
The subway is like so 2 centuries ago.
Yawn. NYC’s population has been increasing since 2000, after going through a decline. Lower Manhattan in particular has gotten some 50,000 additional residents in the post-9/11 era, making it a residential neighborhood again. The current New Yorkers are making a culture there, or rather several new cultures. In 50 years their culture will be remembered as much as the early- and mid-1900s cultures.
One thing that struck be the last time I was in NY in 2008, when all the Wall Street shenanigans and Madoff were being revealed. All of that is local news there, CNN is a local TV station, etc. I never thought of it that way because I’m used to thinking of national news figures as these disembodied people that would never have any direct relationship to me or any town I’d be in. But in NYC a lot of them are right there, and what they do affects the local economy and the life of the other residents. That is a culture, or at least part of one, and it’s more than just a ghost from before 1969.
50,000 residents among a metro area of tens of millions.
Big deal!
And I bet after the 2007 bust, it probably lost 500,000 residents.
Does SDOT have a breaking ground date for the new First Hill Streetcar?
Any reason for any delays?
Tim
How about emailing SDOT to ask them? You’ve asked this before and no-one knew…
http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/contact.htm
Sadly, if they made this same film at Westlake Station, and slowed it to the same speed, it would be 35 minutes long.
And someone would very slowly try to sell you drugs at the end.
No-one’s ever tried to sell me drugs at Westlake, however they do have the stupid scientologists who try to give you their literature. Just another reason to prefer University St station.
You must have very different physical attributes than I do. Do you look much older than you actually are? Or perhaps wear a business suit when downtown?
I can’t seem to get 20 feet from that tunnel entrance without being solicited or harassed in one way or another.
Yes, I do know that Seattle is statistically a very safe place. But that video reminded me how beautiful it is to emerge from the subway back east without having to part an ocean of sketch (the way Westlake, Pioneer Sq, and often I.D. Station force you to).
“how beautiful it is to emerge from the subway back east without having to part an ocean of sketch”
The video won’t play on my computer, but your statement is ironic given the problems in NYC in the 1970s. Now the trends have reversed.
Seattle’s near-fully gentrified and wealthier than it’s ever been. So what’s its excuse?
Oh, right! The transit system is a perpetual put-off, so people stay in their cars, so there’s no critical mass of non-sketchy people to outnumber the sketchy ones.
Good transit -> good pedestrian environment. We need to stop making excuses for our transit lack.
I dress pretty casual. I suspect if anything I look too nerdy to sell drugs to. The only place where I’ve encountered stuff like that was on The Ave where some guy practically begged me to buy week off him, and other time when a hobo called me a fatass after I ignored his request for money. 3rd & Pike, 3rd & Pine, and the Prefontaine exit of Pioneer Square station are the only other places I’ve seen dubious characters, but they’ve never bothered me.
I have never understood why Seattle tolerates the homeless and beggars so much. They take away so much from the city and I know foreign tourists sure don’t look at them as a positive. Sure wish Mark Sidran was our Mayor!
What do you propose we do with them?
There’s also the Larouchebags that hang around there every election season.
And d.p. hits the nail on the head. Not too long ago, one of my employees had her car in the shop, so she tried taking the bus to work. The first leg of her trip was a crush-loaded 358, where she was accosted by a crackhead. When she got to work, she swore she would never again ride the bus. For the next few days she bummed rides where she could and when she couldn’t.
As soon as her van was out of the shop, she was back to driving. Uninsured and on a suspended license, of course.
Oh, the LaRouchebags are here nine months of the year. They hang out right next to my apartment on 1st & Union.
* “hitchhiked when she couldn’t”. Damn lack of an edit feature.
Cinesea: You can’t make simple begging illegal – courts have ruled time and time again that the 1st amendment right to free speech includes the right to ask for money/drugs/booze on the street. We’ve got laws against aggressive panhandling, defined as tightly as is constitutionally allowable. If you, as a pedestrian, don’t report it to the cops, then that’s your choice.
Most of the problematic panhandlers and homeless – the ones that cause disturbances – are pretty severely mentally ill, and usually drug addicted on top of it. They’ve been kicked out of every privately-run shelter in town, and we haven’t had a government framework for dealing with people too fucked-up to function for almost 3 decades now. They get thrown in jail for doing something crazy and stupid; while they’re there under the care of the county, they get a couple of doses of whatever psych meds they need and sober up. Once they’ve stood trial and done their trivial jail time for whatever trivial shit they did, they’re spit back out onto the street at 4th & James, and their mental health care is officially over. Within a few days, they’re incoherent again.
Why do we have so many more homeless than say, New York? Because here you can be homeless and stand a better chance of not freezing to death in the wintertime. The homeless in Chicago or New York have to behave, because getting kicked out of a shelter in the wintertime is damn near a death sentence.
Completely disagree, D.P.
What you call the “sketch” factor has little to do with transit quality and much to do with the fact that Seattle is one of the rare successful US cities that concentrates its social services (public and private) amid its CBD and tourist destinations. You simply will not find many missions, free clinics, halfway houses, needle exchange programs, work programs, or whatever else in Manhattan or the Loop—let alone along 5th Avenue or the Mag Mile. People like Koch, Giuliani, Rich and Dick Daley, and Bloomberg collaborated with commercial and racial interests in a way that makes South Lake Union look like Hamsterdam (and yes, that means you can call Paul Allen “Bunny”).
Third and Pike confounded me when I moved here until I spent an afternoon really looking around. Then it became clear: if you’re facing a court date or confronting homelessness or struggling with any sort of addiction or mental illness and also dependent on the state or non-profits? Third and Pike is someplace life will take you on the daily, flush against the retired couple from Topeka and the admin assistant a month out of UW. That nexus doesn’t exist in New York or Chicago.
I’m not going to get into whether it would be better to disperse existing services around the city in a way that renders the underclass and its struggles less visible to white collars and tourists at the expense of two- or three-seat rides to NA meetings and needle exchanges. But it’s plain to see that the visibility you abhor stems from a commitment to social justice, not bad transit. Which is to say that Central Link and U-Link could double their ridership estimates and you’d just be pressed up closer to the “Ocean of sketch” once you leave train so long as that ocean still has an appointment at 2nd and Bell.
Lack,
My point was, in Seattle, we’ve accepted beggars and homeless as a main part of the city. Instead of making it uncomfortable for beggars and homeless people, we accept them and try to make THEM more comfortable. If it is so easy for them to be beggars, then why would they ever want to try to NOT be begging all the time? And, then we get more and more coming here. I’d much rather my tax dollars going for something productive than helping the beggars survive on the streets and damaging the livability for the rest of us, who actually work hard being productive members of society. Enough of my tax dollars are wasted and I’d rather see them put to use creating something that benefits actual people.
“If it is so easy for them to be beggars, then why would they ever want to try to NOT be begging all the time?”
Because they could be earning $100 a day instead of $35 if they had a regular job, and they wouldn’t have to spend hours in the humiliating and frustrating act of begging.
Some 20% of the homeless are mentally ill who were thrown out of the institutions in the 80s when they were closed, and there was going to be day community services for them but that never emerged. Another percentage are veterans whom our country has done f**k all to to take care of.
For a variety of reasons, the most visibly homeless are drug/alcohol addicts who refuse the services of the shelters because they have to be sober there. Some of that is related to said lack of mental-health treatment and veterans’ services (plus the condition of Native American services), but of course some of it is unrelated. A majority of street kids (i.e., those under 18) were kicked out of their house because their parents are drug addicts or rigidly religious (i.e., they don’t want a gay kid in their house), etc. Those kids who have nice homes and families to go back to don’t remain on the street for long, because they can see that what the other street kids most want is a nice family like they have.
The other day I was on a D40LF that had a brand new variable message sign in it around the stop request light! It wasn’t showing anything yet, but I guess it needs to have the whole GPS system installed before it can work. Still, pretty cool. (Coach #3600)
This is what the sign looks like. It looks bulky and not as compact as the RapidRide signs.
I don’t know personally, but Tim thinks that’s nothing new: https://twitter.com/#!/AtomicTaco/status/37056084887732224
It’s been on that coach since January 2010 or earlier.
Beautiful shots, but really didn’t convey the feeling of emerging from a subway stop — it felt more like nostalgia rather than revelation.
Kirkland Transit Center designers, when you put an anti-jay-walking fence running down the middle of the road, why did you make it only waist-high, so it’s easy to step over, and why did you create gaps in the fence about every ten feet wide enough for people to slip through?
And why do you think your own customers are too stupid to choose the most direct route to the their stops without stepping in front of a bus or car?
And why does it look so much sparser and less welcoming than in the picture?
projects.soundtransit.org/x1309.xml
HTML test
“And why do you think your own customers are too stupid to choose the most direct route to the their stops without stepping in front of a bus or car?”
Years of experience.
To be clear, I’m referring to a minority of our passengers who probably aren’t “stupid” but simply don’t realize the risks they are taking.
If you penalize jaywalking, your citizens will never learn good jaywalking habits.
But like the proverb says, “teach a man to jaywalk…”
When you live in a jaywalking culture, you internalize the physics of vehicle trajectory, the rhythms of human movement, and the eye contact necessary to make it all work.
Jaywalking cities are safer places to be a pedestrian. Period.
I have no problem with Jaywalking cities and even do a bit strategic Jaywalking here. (Gasp!) The type of Jaywalking I’m talking about would probably get you a ticket in NY – It’s pretty stupid and dangerous stuff.
I think the fence is simply designed to convey a psychological message, rather than to be a physical obstruction. You’d have to talk to a 255 operator to know if it works, though.
An important trait this video highlights is the multiple, scaled points of entrance and egress at NYC subway stations rather than grandiose one-entrance station houses set back twenty feet from the street. One 14-foot-wide staircase on four corners gets people where they’re going without causing bunching at the entrances.
If only we ever could get stairwells on 4 corners of a block. Our options seem to always be “multiple entrances scattered at various inconvenient hidden mid-block locations” or “One large, obvious, but semi-inconveniently placed entrance”,
Can someone explain to me the relationship between ORCA and SLUT? For example, I have a $2.25 PugetPass and an e-purse. Were I ever to get checked on the SLUT (has anyone ever been spot checked on the SLUT?), would they care that my PugetPass doesn’t technically cover the fare?
My general understanding with ORCA is that e-purse covers whatever your pass doesn’t cover. So I think it would take 25c from your e-purse. If for some reason your pass was not considered valid, the whole $2.50 would be taken from e-purse. I see nothing on the SLUT website to suggest it works any differently than other services.
That’s how it SHOULD work, but the SLUT doesn’t have ORCA readers, so they
they simply accept ORCA as a flash pass and assume you paid on another leg of your journey.
ORCA’s marketshare, so to speak, is so low at this point that they don’t care if they lose fares over it. If Metro ever stops issuing transfers, and ORCA takes off, then they’ll probably install readers.
Until SLUT gets proper readers, they’ll probably accept the cards as flash passes. What the official site says: “ORCA cardholders can show their card as proof of payment on the Seattle Streetcar.” I think they assume most people are transferring from a Metro bus, so they’ve already paid in a sense (even though technically the system has no idea unless a card is tapped).
Hamburg Germany is proposing a 3.5 mile 100M Euro aerial cable car. To connect their “Red Light District”.
http://goo.gl/oVB1r
America’s Strangest Roadside Attractions
Other note worth items I can remember are the hat and boot down in Georgetown and the wierd restaurant building that used to be west of the Seattle Center parking garage. Of course now there’s EMP. And then there’s the Lincoln Toe Truck which I haven’t seen in some time. And there used to be a small plane on the roof of the Renton Holiday Inn until the FAA made them take it down. What else?
Animation of St. Paul Minnesota’s extension of Light Rail. Nicely done.