Comments on What He Said

I accidentally picked up a King County Metro "Ride right" brochure today. It reminds readers in bold, underlined print that "urinating or defecating" on the bus is illegal. Thanks Metro!

zzzzzzzzzz"A study released by the RAND Corporation reports that 300,000 U.S. troops deal with depression or post traumatic stress disorder and 320,000 suffered brain injuries stemming from their service in Iraq and Afghanistan."zzzzzzzzzz

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

@2:

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

There is 25 minutes between buses on my route during the morning rush hour.

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.

Compared to taking the 194, light rail to the airport will be heavenly.

My gawd #3 that is so witty and sloglike I weep with joy.

Dan

Yeah, but light rail actually kills people. Lots of 'em. Regularly. When's the last time you heard of someone getting killed by a bus?

I agree, there is a lot that could be done to make Metro more pleasant and efficent and thereby increase ridership. I was recently in Austin, TX. and the transit authority thought long and hard about how to lure Texans from their cars. The buses have a GPS system with audio that announces the upcoming stops in English and Spanish and for those who are hearing impaired there is a reader board. It is much better than hoping you get a driver who bothers to announce the stops when on an unfamiliar route. The buses are very clean and have incredibly powerful air-conditioning and heat. The buses also tend to arrive on time there which is a real treat.

I hope you're right Dan, but I ain't a-holding my breath. If it takes Metro 3 freakin years (!!) just to establish a Rapid Ride bus route from the Fauntleroy ferry dock to downtown, what's it going to take to implement even the modest improvements Atrios mentions? And we're talking adding BUS routes, not tearing up the streets for rail.

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

It takes me an hour to get home from Redmond on Sound Transit's "Express" bus, a distance of bout 12 miles. It took me 20 minutes to get home from my job in Pleasanton, CA to SF on BART, a distance of about 40 mles.

There are two other problems with buses:

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).

How about we raise the price of bus fare to $4.00 each way to increase the number of routes, the extension of routes, and to help pay for more light rail?

The next light rail ballot won't replace any sticky seats on metro buses. It will only replace Sound Transit buses in the suburbs. These buses already have padded seats, overhead compartments, individual lights, and individual air vents. There is very rarely a homeless person, garbage, or odors on these buses.

There's a good chance we'll get to vote for more light rail this year. I think the key to it though is not releasing the plan too soon.

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.

Seriously, why aren't there route maps at bus stations? The whole time the bus tunnel was closed metro never got around to updating the bus numbers at the surface stops for the 71/72/73.

How can you be posting to SLOG if you're running for the bus right now?

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

The reality is there is a large percentage of the population who will consider a ride on light rail or monorail who will not consider a ride on a bus on the same route taking the same time to travel.

The GPS timing system in SF works beautifully whenever I use it. It lets me know if I missed the bus, or if I only have a small waiting time. It also lets me know if I have time to go do whatever. Not knowing when the bus is coming, and having to play a mystery game of "did I just miss it, or is it late?" really sucks.

Yeah, why would the city offer services for very low income people like transportation or dumpsters and portapotties at encampments when it can sweep away their survival gear and force 2600 to sleep uncovered and unsheltered? Obviously, those damned smelly homeless people need to get off our buses and just walk. It's their fault, after all.

@10, that translates to an average speed of 120 mph. You sure about those numbers?

@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?

@14: Good points, and remember, there will be lots of the young, less jaded, and less manipulated voters turning out in November. That "blue wave" could easily be enough for ST to "ride the wave" well into the next phase of

Yeah, tt, and they're great for target practice too! Except, er, when they're too drunk to run.

In break-downs and traffic jams, at least with a bus you can get off and walk. On a train you're much more trapped, like the commuters here the other day.

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.

well, light rail will be our only hope anyway - metro doesn't want any more customers (the buses are already full and there's no more funding to add more service) - and they also just handed off 40% of service hours to the eastside (only 20% of service goes to seattle)

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?

Buses suck. And I say that as someone who takes them every day (although my 125 to West Seattle and back is the least sucky of them, I must say).

@17: Sure. They'll also be more likely to ride if there are in-seat entertainment systems, reclining seats and free lattes. What's your point?

@20 - because they pollute your environment when they choose to ride in low mpg single occupancy vehicle cars ....

@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.

There are literally THREE very rich people in this region standing between us and a light rail future:

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.

"But you can make a better bus system. With GPS systems you can have real time information at bus stops about when (and what) bus is arriving."

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.

To those here attacking those who will ride rail rather than buses, and saying things like "Yeah, they'd ride if we gave them all ipods, too" - here's a point to chew on.

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'd be happy if the King County transit trip planner gave me more than 3 itineraries to choose from. Sometimes, all three suck and I know there would be a better way if they let me see a few more options. That and making route maps that I can actually interpret, would be nice.

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.

When was the last time you voted for the person who runs Metro?

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

@28 - you forgot the outgoing Pierce County Exec.

@28,

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)

@ 8 the GPS stuff would be amazing. but i just wanted to add that you can always ask the bus driver to call out your stop when you first get on the bus. you can also ask other riders when to get off. i realize this requires TALKING to people on the bus though, which is something i have noticed people don't like to do in seattle.

@ 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.