14 ms·

How Seattle blew its chance at a subway system (2016)

• gandreani 8y ago
  The best time to build a rail system is kind of like the best time to plant a tree. 20 years ago. It's sad but it seems to me contemporary Americans don't want to pay for something that they will only reap the benefits of in later decades There's so much in that style of thinking. The irony of depending on roads built decades ago. The debt system conditioning people to expect to "get it now, pay it later". The hypocrisy in "investing" 10k-100k in an education but not a few measly percent in taxes
  • rayiner 8y ago
    The problem is not that the benefits will come in decades, but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Here in DC we built a subway 40 years ago. It’s a huge boondoggle that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown.
    • pcwalton 8y ago
      The D.C. Metro has a daily ridership of 612,652 and an annual ridership of 179,693,126. Farebox recovery is 62%, which exceeds that of Vienna and is almost as high as that of Munich. If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often. If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro. [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-on-public-transit-in-the-u-s/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...
      • oh_sigh 8y ago
        That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.
        • melling 8y ago
          Don’t we spend a lot of federal dollars on roads, bridges, etc? https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern...
        • function_seven 8y ago
          It might be partially funded by taxpayer money. Is that benefiting the taxpayer by reducing road congestion or having cleaner air? (I don’t know the answer to this for any given metro, but it’s the question that needs answering)
        • wolco 8y ago
          subtract the additional taxes gained by new business / housing along the line.
        • kiba 8y ago
          Just because we couldn't recover it based on accounting doesn't mean it is not a net benefit.
        • bobthepanda 8y ago
          We don't even do that for roads. If you required transportation infrastructure to all make profit nothing would ever get built.
          • nojvek 8y ago
            That’s probably the wrong way to think about things. Good roads or any transport system allows frictionless trade of goods and services. This means more money moving in the economy and hopefully a boost for the country. This means more taxes back to the govt. Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.
    • mcbutterbunz 8y ago
      Just because someone doesn't ride the subway doesn't mean they don't benefit from it. More people on the subway means fewer cars on the road, cleaner air and water, less maintenance on roads, safer streets.
      • rayiner 8y ago
        Only for people commuting in the same general pattern as the rail routes. The problem in DC is that most jobs in the metro area are actually in the suburbs. Reduced congestion going from Arlington to DC helps road commuters going from Arlington to DC, but does nothing for the folks commuting from Ashburn to Reston or Bowie to Bethesda. I live in Anne Arundel. Folks here are now footing the bill for WMATA thanks to the Maryland funding commitment. Metro is doing nothing to reduce congestion anywhere around here (there is no Metro station in the county).
        • jacobwil 8y ago
          Are you saying that there are zero people that take the MARC commuter rail out of Odenton and transfer to Metro? People that would (without Metro) have no way of getting from MARC to their DC jobs would disagree with you that Metro it doesn't reduce congestion on 295 and other congested roads that pass through Anne Arundel.
          • rayiner 8y ago
            Anne Arundel’s share of the Metro commitment is about $13 million (probably more because the county has higher median income than Maryland as a whole). Just 3,000 daily riders board at Odenton. Let’s say 2,000 are going to DC and 1,000 to Baltimore. That means the county is paying $6,500 per year to facilitate Metro connnections for each rider. 295 moreover carries over 100,000 cars per day (more than double the entire MARC system). Another 2,000 would be a rounding error.
            • Anechoic 8y ago
              Another 2,000 would be a rounding error. 2,000 would be 2%. That's in the range of a traffic change (1% - 5%) that would degrade the Level of Service of a highway from D (design goal) to E or F. It doesn't take much of a reduction in traffic to significantly improve free-flow. Or, conversely, it doesn't take much an increase in numbers to make traffic suck more than it already does.
    • saosebastiao 8y ago
      The sentiment you express will likely be down voted by mass transit advocates, but it should be understood better by them. Cause it sucks to pay massive taxes and see other people get all the benefit. The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.
      • pcwalton 8y ago
        Lots of us transit advocates were glad to see BART vote down the proposed Livermore extension because of exactly the effect you mention: it's spending a lot of money to enhance services for rich people, when bus service would be more practical. Transit advocacy doesn't mean "all rail all the time".
        • saosebastiao 8y ago
          Of course not. I'm a transit advocate myself, but I'd rather see 200 miles of at grade light rail than 50 miles of subway. But it's extremely common in discussions about alternatives to find attitudes like "we might as well not build it at all if it's going to be at grade". It's a deliberate ignorance of opportunity costs, often advocated by those who primarily benefit from an alternative. For example, I can predict whether someone prefers a tall bridge or subterranean crossing versus a much cheaper drawbridge over the ship canal in Ballard, merely by knowing if they live in Ballard or not.
        • jhbadger 8y ago
          Yes, but in practice as a transit user (not in the bay area), rail generally ends up being more practical. Typically trains come every 3 to 10 minutes. In theory, buses could be this common, but more typically they run every 30 minutes or so. And taking into account a typical trip involves a transfer or two, this can make even short commutes over an hour, not acceptable to most people. The goal of transit isn't just to provide an option to the destitute (although it is nice if it does), but to make a serious impact on congestion by making a better alternative to driving for people who otherwise would have done that.
    • yongjik 8y ago
      > ... that is usable for a single digit percent of the taxpayers who pay for it. You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.
      • oftenwrong 8y ago
        relevant: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...
    • matchbok 8y ago
      Metro cost a small, small fraction of what highways cost. It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now. There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges. I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.
      • dashundchen 8y ago
        Yes, and even the most conservative of auto drivers won't even blink at a dropping a billion dollars on one additional lane in an interchange, doing nothing to alleve congestion. But if you even speak of spending that on transit, everyone starts screaming. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-dollar-interchange-expansion-looks-like/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-...
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      DC Metro is awesome and what a world-class city deserves, a train from the airport to downtown. (Except for those fare machines from the 80s.)
    • TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      > Folks in Richmond who might ride Metro a few times in their lifetime or lower income folks who work in the suburbs subsidize the commutes of lawyers and federal government workers who work downtown. What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.
    • dionidium 8y ago
      A small percentage of residents use any particular road, too, but that doesn't make roads useless. The way to get to a large percentage of residents using any road is by building roads literally everywhere that people are. If the subway went more places, then more people would use it, too. Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.
    • smileysteve 8y ago
      >but that they won’t come at all to most taxpayers. Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision. As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable; 1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%) 2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs 3) Better for the disabled 4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.
  • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    Hah, the "20 years" ago comment made me think that is Austin to a T. In 2000 a bond proposal failed (just barely) that would have been a great starter line down the main corridor in central Austin ( http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-resonates-today http://www.kut.org/post/why-austins-rail-fail-2000-still-res... ). Now, though, I really feel it's almost too late for rail in Austin, with our enormous growth from that time making any sort of land acquisition crazy expensive. The $1 billion+ plus proposal from 2014 mentioned in that linked article was also voted down, but it was phenomenally expensive and didn't actually go where it would do much good - a lot of people saw it as a giveaway for investors who had purchased land along the route. So yeah, I feel we blew our chance, too, and now I feel our main hope is, if not fully self-driving cars, at least networkable cars that could make much better use of the available road space.
    • yonkshi 8y ago
      I had a discussion with a buddy about the California high speed rail and similar land prices issue. Surprisingly, eminent domain allows the gov to acquire land fairly cheaply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States
      • nradov 8y ago
        Eminent domain doesn't make lane acquisition cheap. The government has to pay market price.
        • ghaff 8y ago
          And furthermore, eminent domain is (for the most part rightly) very politically fraught these days. Clearly it's sometimes needed but I'm perfectly happy with it being difficult, expensive, unpopular, and requiring a lot of justification.
          • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
            It wouldn't be so fraught if local politicians stopped trying to use it for "economic development" projects backed by people they owe favors too. If eminent domain weren't an expensive PITA then it would be abused.
  • jeffwilcox 8y ago
    Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work... The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!
    • techsupporter 8y ago
      At the time, businesses along Rainier Ave pushed for a surface alignment instead of a tunnel to get more stops along Rainier, to avoid disruption to business access from cut-and-cover tunneling, and because they thought having people above ground would make their area more visible. (There were also people who raised the idea that building a light rail system from the northern, and more white, part of Seattle down to the airport while "hiding" the more non-white part of Seattle from those riders by putting them in a tunnel was socially unfair.) It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do. That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.
      • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        At the time, I remember many citizen groups complaining that Ranier should have a tunnel or st least some more grade separation. Light rail and HSR are completely different things though. Also, the area lacks much density on its outside for HSR to go anywhere, maybe Portland with a stop in Vancouver and Tacoma?
        • tjr225 8y ago
          Olympia would be a good stop too. When Worked down there for the State there were people that commuted all the way from Renton and even Portland(Seriously). Not to mention I reckon there is a lot of traffic from Seattle <-> Olympia. Now that you mention it add it Bellingham too. The only issues with this is I can see a lot of complaints about rising property values in the more rural parts of the Sound, but you've got to start making adaptations for the influx of people at some point, right?
  • droopybuns 8y ago
    Part of the problem is that King County and the Seattle city council have all alienated a major chunk of constituents. It’s bad enough to endure a tax increase- but the leaders end up fucking over the landowners so much that even if they know it would be for the best, nobody trusts them to spend the cash the way they promised.
    • Latteland 8y ago
      I've lived in King County for 20 years. Yes, taxes have been going up a crazy amount, so have our needs, so have our home values. But what did they do to screw us over?
      • droopybuns 8y ago
        https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Council-passes-Safeco-Field-13206484.php https://m.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/King-County-Coun... https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washington-supreme-court https://crosscut.com/2018/04/salmon-tribes-should-beat-washi... And just try getting a building permit in unincorporated king county. King county apparently exists for either Seattle, or anyone but King County citizens.
        • Latteland 8y ago
          I don't live in Seattle, I feel reasonably well treated. I do hate that they are spending so much public money on the baseball stadium, but that's not making me feel that terrible. I used to live in unincorporated king county - did you know that there are tons of places that have septic tanks, even well settled neighborhoods have them, because they didn't extend the county sewer lines that far. On your second article, I'm not sure what your point is about the tribes vs Washington state.
    • fungi 8y ago
      Blaming politicians when you only have 42% voter turnout is a pretty weak argument. https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/ Its a democracy, vote for better ppl.
  • cpeterso 8y ago
    The Caldecott Tunnel's fourth bore is an SF Bay Area example of how long it infrastructure investment takes before tax payers can enjoy the benefits. The Caldecott Tunnel in the East Bay had three "bores". The center bore would switch directions at noon to accommodate morning and afternoon rush hour, causing painful merges from four to two lanes for people driving the other direction. Plans for adding a fourth bore, so there would be two eastbound and two westbound bores, started in 2000. Funding wasn't approved until 2007. Construction began in 2009 and the fourth bore opened to the public in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel#Fourth_bore
    • gok 8y ago
      An even more egregious example would be the East span of the Bay Bridge, which was known to be structurally unsafe since the 1950s, collapsed in 1989, and wasn't actually replaced until 2013. So 24 years and $6.5 billion to build (really fix) a 2 mile bridge. The entire original bridge (both spans, plus the Yerba Buena tunnel) cost less than $1.4 billion in 2013 dollars, and was built in around 3.5 years.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        And the first phase of New York's Second Avenue subway just opened about a year ago. It was first proposed in... 1919.
  • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    It isn’t like the system is free to run after it is built, otherwise Seattle had a rail/trolley system 100 years ago that could just have still been in use. I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago. Ya, the right aways would have been easier, but the cheaper tech would have needed to be upgraded and/or maintained. Investing heavily in a rail system right before the huge Boeing bust of the seventies could have ended up pretty badly for Seattle.
    • close04 8y ago
      > saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago I don't think that's what it means. Don't think about the actual costs, think about when you pay the costs and when you reap the benefit. People want to enjoy the benefits with as little effort or sacrifice from their side. - Most people aren't willing to be the ones to have to pay any cost, they'd rather have others do it. - Most people would like to enjoy a benefit as soon as possible, so they'd rather have others put that in place in advance. Combine these 2 and you get the picture: a person today doesn't want to pay for something and even worse, only get it in a decade or more. Any other discomfort just gets piled on an already unfavorable situation.
    • guitarbill 8y ago
      > I think it is really fallacious thinking when saying something would have been cheaper to build X years ago Respectfully, could not disagree more. The more urban development there is, the harder these things get to build. It's probably impossible to do nowadays, and Seattle is a cesspit of traffic, even compared to other US cities. As far as maintenance or upgrades, please. Why do you brush your teeth? Finally, can you measure quality of life, and if so, how much money is it worth? It's shameful that it's always an economic argument, usually by people who are already well-off. The list of benefits for mass rapid transit is endless, and at the end of the day, it's Americans who suffer for not having it, nobody else (except with environmental concerns, i.e. global warming).
      • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        There is a cost to having the infrastructure, just like there is a cost to maintaining a tree. The tree analogy is actually very apt, well, except in that case planting the tree is cheap but keeping it watered is very expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I think this would be a great ideal for Seattle today. But back then? Or even from what I remember in the late 70s and 80s? The system would have been very difficult to justify and might have rotted before it was actually needed. And I say this as someone who had to commute from Bothell to UW by bus in the early 90s.
  • shados 8y ago
    Proper public transit, especially subways, are really the answer to everything... "Can't find jobs!". Well, often it's more "Can't get to the jobs you could do". Public transit! "Need to do more for disabled people!". Public transit! (assuming its built with accessibility in mind). "Need more affordable housing!". Public transit! Further apartments are now viable again (need a lot of public transit though, otherwise all you did is massively gentrify an area and kick the poors out). "Too much traffic!". Ok, you get the drift. Yeah, it's expensive as hell to build...except for the benefits, its probably cheaper than everything else you can do. And even if its not...the benefits are just that significant.
• WalterBright 8y ago
  The annoying thing about ST3 is they totally ignore the existing unused rail lines from Renton to Bothell, which could add 20 miles of critically needed track at little expense.
  • techsupporter 8y ago
    Most of the Eastside cities desperately want to turn those into amenity trails. Kirkland, for one, is on record vehemently opposing any light rail in the Eastside Rail Corridor because they think jogging/biking/walking trails are a better use of that right of way. And the few spots that aren't being or targeted for being converted are still, technically, active freight rail lines so light rail vehicles can't run on them.
    • WalterBright 8y ago
      It's a mystery why King County can't override Kirkland. And even if they can't, it can still be used to connect Bellevue to Tukwila, creating a loop around south Lake Washington. > technically It would be orders of magnitude cheaper for ST to buy them than to create new right-of-way. And I haven't seen a train on them for decades, ever since they tore up where it crossed over I405 in Bellevue.
      • techsupporter 8y ago
        Sound Transit isn't King County. Sound Transit encompasses part of King County and part of its board are elected officials from King, but they are two separate government entities. And it's not that ST can't override Kirkland, it's that it won't override Kirkland. Pissing off a huge constituency of voters is a great way to ensure that not only they vote against, say, Sound Transit 3, they go out of their way to ensure that other people vote against it. As for buying the tracks, there's no obligation for a freight railroad to sell and virtually none will because once that ROW is gone it will never come back. As for quantity of trains, there only has to be one sometime, someday. Look at all of the pushback the immeasurably tiny Ballard Terminal Railroad has done to stop these kinds of projects.
• scythe 8y ago
  Surprisingly, it's one of the (very) few cases where not building the subway was the right idea in the long run, because of the magnitude-9 earthquake risk the region faces that wasn't known about in 1965. A subway could be built today, but an elevated rail system would be safer, according to my limited understanding of earthquake safety.
  • curtis 8y ago
    Surprisingly, tunnels have very good earthquake resistance. See http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Status/Blog/tunnels-and-earthquakes http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Status/Blog/tunnels....
    • oh_sigh 8y ago
      Interesting. Would the safety of a tunnel depend on whether the most powerful pressure waves were traveling parallel with the tunnel or perpendicular to it?
    • oftenwrong 8y ago
      That was an incredibly simple and effective explanation: >Imagine a plate of fruit-filled gelatin dessert. Tunnels are like the pieces of fruit at the base of the gelatin, while above-ground structures are like the fruit toward the top. If you shake the plate, the movement becomes more exaggerated as it flows up from the base of the gelatin. In an earthquake, this translates to tunnel movement measured in inches, while the movement above ground might be measured in feet.
  • EB66 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure the opposite is true -- below ground structures are more resistant to earthquakes. Earthquake concerns are the primary reason the above ground SR-99 viaduct is being torn down and replaced with a below ground tunnel. But I do agree that if they had built a tunnel 50 years ago, it definitely wouldn't have been designed to be resistant to a magnitude 9 earthquake.
    • 8y ago
• melling 8y ago
  I imagine everything is a lot more expensive now. More people, right of ways, etc Didn’t California want to build its high-speed rail in the 1970s? Americans chose to pay later for mass transit. Now it’ll cost us a fortune.
  • oconnor663 8y ago
    Maybe we'll get lucky and perfectly safe self driving cars will solve the problem once and for all in 20 years?
    • statguy 8y ago
      A Subway line will always be an order of magnitude more efficient than a system where each individual is in a separate vehicle, self driving or not.
      • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Depends on utilization and capacity needs. A subway is an incredibly much more inefficient use of capital if it only needs to handle a few passengers an hour between fixed points, let alone non fixed ones.
        • statguy 8y ago
          Sure, it dosen't make sense to build subway lines to replace all roads/highways. However, as bobthepanda's comment says, once the demand on a route exceeds a threshold, mass transit wins by a mile.
          • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
            Yes, but parent used an unqualified “always” without any room for additional context.
    • s0rce 8y ago
      I can't see even self-driving cars coming close to the transportation efficiency of light/heavy rail. You just can't fit people close together if each person is in big metal box. Also, self-driving cars would likely increase the amount of time people would tolerate in a vehicle as you can do other things so more people would be willing to sit in traffic and commute times might not even improve.
• seattle_spring 8y ago
  Sad. Same people that ruined Forward Thrust seem to be going out of their way to ruin ST3, just so they don't have to pay slightly more for their $100k Teslas.
  • c256 8y ago
    Don’t underestimate the business interests of the people who have built up infrastructure on the east side of the water. There are several deep pockets who do not want their customer base to have easier access to markets in Seattle proper. ...and then there’s the giant ball of NIMBY/“preserving property values” that is Mercer Island...
  • slededit 8y ago
    To be fair registration costs went up massively even on non-teslas.
  • stephengillie 8y ago
    Registration for my Toyota Camry Hybrid is 10x normal, thanks to ST3.
  • mikestew 8y ago
    That's disingenuous at best. I voted for transit, and I'd vote for it again, but I can't say I wasn't a little shocked to open a bill for $275 for a friggin' motorcycle (granted, a pricey BMW motorcycle, but still...). I'm near enough to retirement that for the most part I won't even use light rail, but I'm happy for my money to go toward building it. And yet I can still sympathize with those might say, "whoa, wait a minute..." when they see how much tabs cost now. Can you not do the same?
    • seattle_spring 8y ago
      Nope, because the expected costs were available and extremely clear. My new bill matched almost exactly to what I was expecting.
• sammychl 8y ago
  In a few years, subway and mass transit will be obsolete. Everyone will travel by autonomous cars. Like the internet, a distributed architecture, will cause traditional server mainframe networking to be obsolete. Train networks will be the biggest waste of public money for those who start these projects within next couple years.
  • legulere 8y ago
    To realize that you would need autonomous street building robots. Cars are simply not space-efficient enough.
    • lliiffee 8y ago
      Honest question: what if those self-driving cars have multiple people in them? With 4 people you quadruple the throughput, and this seems technically achievable with technology. Minivans and the like go further. I certainly haven't run the numbers vs rail but in most regions it seems like 4x ing the highways would meet current needs comfortably.
      • cimmanom 8y ago
        At which point why not just use buses and... trains?
        • hnal943 8y ago
          Busses and trains aren't available in my driveway when I want them.
          • cimmanom 8y ago
            But an autonomous vehicle with 3 strangers is?
            • hnal943 8y ago
• tjr225 8y ago
  I used to commute by car every day. Now I take the Sounder out of the city. It's incredible how much better it is even though it takes twice as long as driving would... But, people ain't smart and they love their cars. Here's to hoping ST3 actually happens!
• jupiter90000 8y ago
  The thing that throws me off about Seattle is that there seems to be a large segment of the population that says, "yes, we have certain problems (homelessness, transportation) that we as a community should solve." But then, when it comes to breaking out the wallet and paying for what's needed, either the same people or an even larger majority seem to be vehemently opposed to doing so. I'm not really sure what's going on, is it like this everywhere? Wishing that the problems get fixed by just holding out and hoping something gives?
  • bobthepanda 8y ago
    People are like this everywhere. No one likes taxes. That being said, Seattle did end up funding ST3 (the contemporary referendum in the article) as well as an earlier tax raise to pay for expanding bus services. In fact, even Forward Thrust had a majority of votes, but due to a quirk in how the referendum was organized they needed to pass a 60% threshold.
  • mrep 8y ago
    Not sure where you are getting the "vehemently opposed to breaking out their wallet for transportation" because Seattle is breaking out their wallet to the tune of $53.8 billion for st3 (talked about the proposal in the article and it later passed) which adds 62 miles of track [0] which is in addition to st2 10 years ago which cost $17.8 billion and added 50 miles [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Transit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Transit_3 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Transit#Sound_Transit_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Transit#Sound_Transit_2
    • jupiter90000 8y ago
      Sure -- you noticed that like ~46% of voters choosing on the issue opposed it though right? I mean maybe that's typical to have something like this win by a 4% margin but I'd have to say it's far from a general majority saying, "yep, let's do it." Then you've got the people who probably didn't even vote and found out about it when their car registration fee went up a couple hundred bucks. BTW, I voted for it so I'm aware, I just find it hard to believe it's so borderline and there's folks who seem really angry they need to contribute to the community's well-being. But hey, I guess as someone else said, no one likes to pay taxes.
• herodotus 8y ago
  Vancouver used the excuse of hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics to build a LRT system called "The Canada Line". The line runs from the YVR airport through downtown to the waterfront station (near the cruise ships terminal). As it happened, one of the stops was very close to the Apple office I worked at. What an improvement to my life for my frequent trips to Cupertino. No more leaving the office for the airport early in case of traffic on the way to the airport; no more harrowing trips from a crazy cab driver; just a pleasant stroll to the station from the office, and a (usually) comfortable seat for the 22 minute ride to the airport. The system was an instant success (based on ridership). It was also (as it happens) a boon to developers because of new high-density building opportunities near Canada Line stations. The only bad part is that the city allowed no room for extra cars - the line has a two-car limit because of the platforms. In my view, opposition to public transit is incredibly misguided. I found the article in the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...) about the Koch brothers particularly depressing: not the Koch's part, but that so many young people apparently were happy to participate in killing transit proposals. I would be surprised if you could find a single person in this city who thinks public transit is a mistake.
  • close04 8y ago
    The short answer is "they don't know any better". And that's because they have never seen "the other" option in a fully functioning system.
    • ng12 8y ago
      I mean NYC is not really a secret. The problem is a mental association between big city subway systems and societal problems that plague big cities.
      • mixmastamyk 8y ago
        The US is big enough that most folks away from the northeast have never been there.
• bfrog 8y ago
  Heh, the CTA here in Chicago isn't perfect, but wow is it useful. I put on about 2 to 3k miles a year on my car thanks to added bike lanes and public transit. I can tell you biking, bus, and train are far more enjoyable than sitting in a car in traffic
• purplezooey 8y ago
  People started listening to Ronald Reagan's nonsense early, I guess.