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October 03, 2005
Why Buses Are Better
From the Seattle Times:
Lydia Mencias had only a moment before her bus arrived, still enough time to rant about how the latest monorail plan stops short of her Ballard neighborhood.She said she's always voted for the monorail but plans to vote against it Nov. 8.
"If I have to take a bus to Interbay and get on it, why shouldn't I just stay on the bus and go?" she said. "Why should I support it if it's not useful to me?"
Thank you Lydia. You highlight the biggest flaw in Seattle's push to develop mass transit... nobody is going to use it. Both the monorail and Sound Transit are developing what would best be described as "starter" lines. Unfortunately, both have been plagued by cost overruns, and shortened routes. They'll just have to wait until we vote for ever MORE transit funding. Uh oh, somebody is living in FANTASY LAND!!!
If you spend billions of a mass transit system that doesn't go anywhere useful, do you really think we're going to okay the next phase of your pet project? What we'll be left with is decades of debt, and two incompatible (and incomplete) mass transit systems that basically serve many of the same areas. We could just repair and rebuild some of our congested freeways, but people in FANTASY LAND don't believe in driving cars.
But that's what real people do. They drive cars. Even when they use mass transit, they drive cars. They get in their car, and then they park it at a Park & Ride, and then they take the bus. Now you want them to get in a car, hop on a bus, transfer on to a train, hop on another bus, and then finally walk to their destination. And do it all over again when it's time to go home. In the real world, this is called a "hassle" and most of us don't want to deal with it. Some of us will... people who can't afford cars, people who are ideologically opposed to inefficient personal transportation (a.k.a. gas-burning cars.) But most of us won't.
What's sad is that we already have a great transit system. Buses are superior in nearly every way to light rail or monorail. Sure, they can be slow because they are forced to share the road with cars. But they can also go anywhere you want them to. If there is suddenly a need for more buses in, say, Redmond, you can create more bus routes there. You can't do that with light rail. Furthermore, the bus will often pick you up right in front of your apartment, or just down the street from your house.
It's not an ideal system. It takes too long to get anywhere, and you often have to switch buses. But how does spending billions on fashionable rail solutions fix this? It doesn't.
Worst of all, ten years of now, when we have our light rail and/or our monorail, we'll still be stuck in traffic... and we're not going to be too happy when you come calling for yet more money.
Posted by March at October 3, 2005 07:04 PM