13 ms·

Funny how Seattle was left out of the comparison to other PNW cities. I'm not surprised... Seattle's transportation situation is abysmal.

• seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Metro/ST isn't that bad, I take it rather than rent a car when in Seattle, but I don't venture out of the West Seattle-Seattle-Bellevue core where service is pretty good.
  • bignaj 12y ago
    Yeah, but you don't have to deal with it every single day. Metro offers pretty horrendous bus service especially considering their cost per passenger one of the highest in the country. Recently voters thwacked a measure seeking more funding for Metro and one of the main reasons I think (among others like aversion to car tab expenses) was anger at mismanagement.
    • techsupporter 12y ago
      I deal with it every single day (living in the CD, working on the Eastside) and I like it. I use it as my primary mode of transportation, with Car2Go a distant second. The measure seeking more funding for Metro (I assume you mean King County TBD Prop 1) was to replace funding that got crushed in the economic downturn and resulting plunge in sales tax. Funding transit by sales tax is unstable but it's all the legislature gives us, other than vehicle registration fees that everyone seems to hate. Prop 1 passed 2-to-1 in Seattle and, if a similar plan goes to the city voters in November, I bet it passes. Metro's "mismanagement" is because it is directly accountable to the King County Council and, thus, to politically-motivated voters. One look at route 2 and its difficult, congested routing across IH-5 shows a prime example. Sound Transit, on the other hand, has an appointed board and can move much more quickly.
    • ghaff 12y ago
      My experience is that everybody (where everybody is defined as a significant majority but not everyone) tends to be at least fairly negative about public transportation that they're forced to use day in and day out. I could name a number of cities that I consider to have pretty good transit if you're going from the right point A to the right point B where I could still imagine it being pretty tiresome using it all the time for a variety of reasons.
      • akgerber 12y ago
        NYC has by-far the best transit in the US, and people still constantly complain about it. I don't think there's any method of commuting people actually like, other than maybe bikes.
    • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      I used it every day through much of the 90s. I used to commute to UW on the 372 from...Bothell, later to downtown Seattle from the U district a lot. Metro is at least way better than Community Transit.
• lotharbot 12y ago
  Transportation of all types in Seattle is abysmal, because Seattle has so many waterways, steep hills, etc. that can only be crossed via a small number of routes. They're always terribly congested.
  • bignaj 12y ago
    Subway service would do wonders but knowing Seattle it will never happen.