>>“Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car." “Solid” is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting. Seattle is terribly managed

>>“Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car." “Solid” is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting. Seattle is terribly managed, because it imported mass quantities of Bay Area voters over the last 15 years as the tech industry grew (Amazon), which rapidly changed everything (population, politics, city in general). It had amazing traffic flow up to 10 years ago and you could drive anywhere quickly even in rush hour. But that has changed. The decade long period of rapid population growth coupled with the war on cars has destroyed what was a highly functional road network. Now there are less lanes to drive on, lots of mostly empty bike lanes, bus lanes that are a waste of space, reduced speed limits to try to force drivers onto public transit, etc. There’s also an insanely expensive light rail (around 100 billion budget so far) that is partially functional and won’t be completed until the 2040s. But to use it you need to take buses to get to the station (parking is full and break-ins are frequent) so it is much too time consuming. The buses themselves are ALWAYS off schedule, to a point where sometimes you can wait more than one cycle on the schedule to see the bus on many routes. Their app to track the buses by GPS is unreliable and misleading. None of the public transit is 24/7 either, despite huge budgets. And with the city facing a massive deficit I doubt there’s more to spend. A bigger issue is the blight across the city. A decade of soft on crime policies means a lot of public transit feels unsafe. Seattle’s police department is at half the level of staffing it needs to be just to match the average. The light rail can sometimes feel like a mobile homeless shelter, which is a shame because of how new and clean the cars are otherwise. Buses often have drug addicts on them. Low level crimes are common but violent crimes are rising. There was an incident recently that was on national news, where a bus driver got stabbed by a rider. People avoid public transit if they have the means. I think for the rail system in Seattle to be useful it has to be frequent, 24/7, with matching frequent and 24/7 bus transit feeding into it, and with a massive focus on law enforcement AND prosecution.