Now back to amusing entertainment at the expense of those not as cool as we cool kids.

and by "those not as cool as we cool kids" you must mean "incontinent hobos."

Following @2, I don't it's posted on Slog, but the WSJ reports that the US released half of the 23,000 Iraqi prisoners that we're holding. 23,000??? Why did we release them? Because it was causing too much political tension in Iraq. Considering that we could release half of them in one day, obviously the tense was quite appropriate, and we continue to just round up and detain people indiscriminately.

Dan

Maybe $11 a gallon gasoline will get folks out of neutral.

1. Buses use roads that are congested with traffic. Get the mass transit off of the roads, and you've made the trip 100 times more enjoyable.

2. Wait times for most rail are 10 minutes or less. My bus is 30 minutes (which is a huge improvement on the 1hr wait between buses when I lived in Denver).

What benefit is gained by announcing the details of the ST2 plan NOW? Why not wait until the last minute?

The sooner the details are released, the sooner the anti-transitists will be able to start pooling their resources and rallying against it, chipping away at the YES votes until eventually the measure fails.

Most people today would vote for nearly any transit measure. But thru negative spin, out-of-state sign-wavers, scare tactics, etc, the YES votes get eroded over time. (The idiots at Sierra Club don't help either.)

By waiting, ST gives the opposition less time to erode the support. To me, it is a no-lose situation. In fact, they (ST) might actually be learning how to get a measure on the ballot AND passed rather than just on the ballot.

More importantly, why? There's something desperately sad about this image...

@17, that's just great. Perhaps those people can foot the bill for their more expensive tastes. Why should I have to pay to accomodate them?

My transit pipe dream is a dedicated bike network. It's urban bliss to bike on Lake Shore Drive when they shut it down to cars.

i wrote a letter to the p-i awhile ago that metro needs to get its act together and start thinking about 'little things' like putting ticket machines at bus stops (they can convert those parking kiosks into ticket machines just like metro did for the streetcar) which have been proven to vastly speed up bus travel times

at this point, i'm just convinced metro is too big, too bureaucratic, too clueless, and really in no position to take on any more customers to bother with anything that improves the customer experience.

and as regards sanitation on buses, i remember one time being asked not to bring food onto a #73 bus (had to throw it in the trash), while a man stood up in the back and urinated on the floor. don't piss where ya eat, eh?

@26 - Look, I'm not talking about many people in Seattle here, I'm talking about a small portion here and a lot in our suburbs of Kent, Bellevue, and other areas that want us in Seattle to pay for their highways we don't want.

Belltown nutjob Mark Baerwaldt

Bellevue Baron Kemper Freeman

Medina egoManiac John Stanton

You might be shocked to discover, not a single one of 'em rides the bus! (Baerwaldt likes to park his sports cars in Belltown bus zones, though...so I guess you could say he's a fan of buses)

There are about a half dozen grudge-driven anti-rail activists you can add in with the three rich guys to form Old White Guys Against Rail (OWGAR).

But it really just comes down to THESE THREE GUYS, their twisted politics, their big/tiny egos, and their BIG BUCKS which make building light rail in Seattle so fricking difficult.

The reason Baerwaldt, Freeman and Stanton need to spend BIG BUCKS is because they know the public is against them. And they know that their weird pet transportation ideas will never fly.

But, hey - when you have millions/billions burning a hole in your bank account, and lotsa time to burn, why not make it your hobby to spend decades obsessing over the destruction of light rail? Sounds like a perfectly normal and healthy pursuit to me.

It's like those big electronic readerboards they put on the freeways.

Rubber-tire transportation is at such an advanced state technologically, they can actually TELL YOU it's gonna take an extra hour to drive home - or, that you're gonna sit in the rain an extra 25 minutess, waiting for your bus which is stuck in car traffic.

Actually, real time bus info does make my bus travels a little less annoying. But the people who sell "Intelligent Transportation Systems" snake oil as a substitute for light rail - those guys are idiots. Dino Rossi + Tim Eyman were even stupid enough to glom on to this latest Discovery Institute diversion.

Those highways? They cost more, per user, per mile traveled. They also actually cause the miles traveled per person to increase as they affect development patterns - they actually make themselves cost more over time.

It is much cheaper to build rail than to expand our highways. So before you talk about how awful it is to build 50 miles of light rail to carry hundreds of thousands a day - let's hear about how cheap it is to build the viaduct - two miles, or less - to carry less than half that number?

I thank the holy lord that I make enough money to afford a car. I'm way too dumb to figure out how to use the bus. Every single time I try to use it, it turns into a demonstration of my inability understand how the bus system works.

It's hard to hold Metro accountable for their stupidity when there's no one person to go after.

You know, Sound Transit did a pretty good job in its first several years of existence nearly running itself into the ground without any help from OWGAR.

I don't think it's OWGAR's fault that Link ain't getting to the central U-District until 2018 (at the earliest!) either.

(I'm sure John Niles will be very sad you left his name off of the list, though)

@ 31 the trip planner at www.commtrans.org makes way more sense. it gives you a lot of options and lets you choose "fastest way" or "minimal transfers" etc to customize your needs. the only reason i would use the metro king county site was if i needed to see a bus route map. i find myself plugging in an intersection to google maps more often though, because it is easier to understand than metro's rudimentary diagrams.