Transportation Solutions
I made the mistake of reading this while I was eating my lunch—some of us still like print newspapers, Eli, and some of us even work at one—and nearly puked. The Seattle Times is praising Ron Sims latest transportation plan—buses! More of them! Lots more!
…a fast-growing region cannot afford to be blasĂ© about transportation planning. This is a smart time to invest in transportation.Buses are a flexible, useful way to move people around if land-use and transportation policies are in sync enough to provide sufficient ridership….
Sims’ so-called “RapidRide” would change the way riders think about bus riding. Riders in key areas would not need bus schedules, as buses would arrive every 10 minutes throughout the day.
Yeah, a fast-growing region cannot afford to be blasĂ© about transportation planning. Tell us all about it, Seattle Times. Because we’re really great at planning transportation fixes around here—and yakking about them, and studying them, and trashing them. What we’re not so good at is, as you know, is actually fucking building them. Witness the monorail’s collapse, which The Seattle Times did everything in its power to bring about. So now we’re never going to have a real rapid transit system in this city—something that is grade-separated, something like a subway system or an elevated system, a transportation option that would be faster than driving—and so that leaves… buses.
Buses—the public transportation option favored by people who do not take public transportation. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that there aren’t any bus commuters on the Seattle Times op-ed board. And Ron Sims? That man only rides the bus for photo-ops. Buses are slow, noisy, and dirty. And thanks to our ride-free area downtown, around here they’re also rolling homeless shelters. Putting more of slow, crowded, stinky buses on the streets isn’t going to do anything to address Seattle’s transportation problem.
Because only grade-separated rapid transit can tempt people out of their cars. People don’t take the subway in New York or the “L” in Chicago because it’s virtuous. They take public transit in those cities because it’s faster than driving. Buses—slow, stuck in traffic, unpleasant—can’t offer commuters speed in exchange for sacrificing the autonomy and privacy of driving. So putting more of them on the street won’t change a fucking thing—and it’s not worth raising taxes to do, as Sims is proposing.
But, gee, what about dedicated bus lanes? Won’t that make buses swift and speedy?
Uh, maybe. But it’s never gonna happen. One of the complaints about the monorail—and the Seattle Times never met a complaint about the monorail that it wouldn’t splash all over its front page—was that it would take a few lanes away from cars on a couple of downtown streets. This, of course, annoyed drivers, who seem to think that they own the streets, and the Seattle Times spent a lot of time feeling their pain. Can you imagine the outcry if Sims actually tries to take lanes away from cars on dozens of streets running all over the country so that buses can use them exclusively? The few HOV lanes we’ve got make drivers crazy—those same drivers are not going to smile on hundreds of miles of dedicated bus lanes, and they will punish any pol who proposes such a scheme.
Let’s face it, folks. We blew it—elevated transit was our only real transportation solution (tunnels are too expensive), and a lack of courage on the part of our elected officials (fuck you, Greg & Ron), the bungling at the monorail agency, the greed of Second Avenue property owners, and the furious cluelessness of the media all conspired to do it in. The least we can do now is refrain from pretending that buses are going to make things better. Get used to those long commutes, folks, whether you’re sitting alone in your car or sitting next to some street lunatic on the bus. Or move closer to work. Those are your only options now—thanks, in large part, to the Seattle Times.
you tell it Dan! buses are the pits
and around here, they're all giant sized for some reason, and make it dangerous for the cars, pedestrians, bikes etc with which they share the street