I’m Not Actually Obsessed w/ the Monorail Anymore, but…
We’re running a letter in today’s paper that trashes an article that Dan wrote in last week’s news section.
I’ve posted the letter below. Basically, the letter takes Savage to task for trashing Ron Sims’s new bus plan. Sims want to raise the sales tax one tenth of one percent (dinging tax payers for about $50 million in the first year). The money would fund frequent bus runs between downtown Seattle and West Seattle and Ballard/Aurora.
I don’t know why Savage didn’t feel compelled to respond. But he should have.
The angry letter blasts the monorail and “the amount of money that was going to be wasted” by comparing it Sims’s convenient bus plan.
But wait a minute: Frequent rides between downtown and West Seattle and Ballard? Isn’t that the monorail line? Yes. And go figure, Sims’s own ridership numbers for his bus plan predict 21 million rides annuallythe same as the monorail’s predictions.
So, let’s compare the cost. The dreaded monorail got killed because it turned out that to pay it off, we were going to have to spend $11 billion over 45-50 years. That was just tooooo expensive for people to fathom. But let’s look at Sims’s plan factored out to serve us over the next 50 years (gotta keep replacing those buses to make it comparable to the long-term life of the monorail.) The $50 million a year, considering the government’s own 5.1% forecasts for sales tax revenue increases, will grow to over $10 billion.
So, while the angry letter below seems to make a good point that a citywide bus system serves more people than the ill-fated monorail Green Line would have, he ignores the fact that Sims’s new bus line itself, the plan Savage was attacking, has the same ridership numbers as the monorail and costs about as much as the monorail.
And keep in mind, there’s a key difference between investing in buses and monorail. Spending so much money on buses promotes our status quo “roads-only” infrastructure, while spending the same amount of money on elevated rapid transit creates a brand new car free infrastructure.
Point being: Ask New Yorkers or Chicagoans: 75 years ago, would you’ve rather had city planners invest in traditional roads or in rapid transit?
GET ON THE BUS
EDITOR: Aw, Dan hates buses ["Bus Load,â Dan Savage, April 27]. They're stinky. They get bogged down in trafďŹc. Undesirable people ride them. They're just so... common. It's true, they're not glamorous like the Disneyland monorail, but guess what? They actually work. They go where you need to go, when you need to go there. Did the monorail ever promise that?
A bus transit system is ďŹexible, scalable, and way more reliable than a silly monorail. For the amount of money that was going to be wasted on the Green Line (never mind the rest of the system), bus service in Seattle could be free, frequent, and comprehensive. All the money goes into moving people, not into expensive infrastructure like real estate, track, and stations.
I live in Ballard, half a mile from the proposed monorail line. The closest station would have been more than a mile away. The closest bus stop is, oh, 40 feet from my front door. The bus gets me downtown at least 10 minutes faster (yes, during rush hour) and closer to my destination than the monorail's projected service would have, not even considering the one-mile walk or ride to the monorail station. Why on earth would I ever ride the monorail? Because it's cute, shiny, and oh so trendy, with no "street lunaticsâ to spoil the quiet, odor-free ambiance of my ride?
Get over it. Rapid transit is a good idea, absolutely. The monorail was a bad idea that never should have gotten as far as it did.
Alan
I really wish people could get their minds around the concept of constant dollars. The monorail wasn't going to cost $11 billion dollars anymore than $3 is going to buy you a gallon of gas in 2060. Inflation: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Unless the economy utterly collapses, of course.
Expensive, long term investment in valuable infrastructure is a GOOD THING. Lots of major projects take decades to pay off. It's called INVESTMENT. Invest in smart things, like transit, and you win; invest in ephemeral junk like sports stadiums and you lose. In the long term. How much do we still owe on the Kingdome?