It must be easy for Charles to write posts here. All he has to do is keep on railing on cars. But it really is hard to tell his posts apart. If he is smart, he'll start recycling his old posts and nobody would ever know!

I don't find Vancouver's public transit all that great.

As someone pointed out in Dom's post, when stuff actually gets discussed, no one in the Stranger seems to care to publish it.

http://seattletransitblog.com/2014/06/23…

Also, am I the only one who hates it when someone writes an ambiguous Vancouver? Portland is next to Vancouver, WA. Are you talking about their public transportation? Or are you talking about the one in the north with the awesome hovercraft?

@2 I think we're meant to reflect on that apparent contradiction in order to reveal a deeper truth. Voting is what you do when you fill out your ballot. Democracy is when an informed citizenry self governs.

20 years gone, billions spent, and all we have are a bunch of tunnels, one half-built, and a slow meandering rail-bus that cannot be classified as "rapid transit".

The one shining light is a diesel train running on freight tracks which only runs six times a day, five days a week. And the north half of it shuts down for mudslides in winter.

mass transit is getting built. s l o w l y, and 20 years too late, but it's getting built. and in a state with no income tax, anti-government hayseeds, and tim eyman, I count that as a fucking miracle.

so quit bitching about the metro cuts - those are imposed by the state - i.e. the anti-government hayseeds.

@8, I also like to refer to those people at the state as Goober Legislators.

I also want to place the blame on natives that are fearful of change and don't want Seattle to turn into NYC.

@ 5, when the subject is comparing NW cities, nobody is going to think Vacouver WA is one of the ones being talked about .

@10: I do when you mention Portland in the same fucking sentence! It leads me to believe you are just talking about the Portland metro area.

We are so far behind in investing in our city that we need radical improvements in both public transportation and automobile infrastructure, and I'm tired of the implication that it can or should be one or the other. I HATE driving, I own a car because it is impossible to have children in this city without one, and even if the public transportation service were good enough, it's too damned expensive.

People always say this about Portland vs. Seattle, but the reality is transit has much higher modeshare in Seattle than Portland. The MAX is nice and all, but Portland is a more car-centric city than Seattle.

I want my monorail. With a a bar car that serves espresso shots in the morning and whiskey shots in the evening. Was it really so much to ask that our leaders have a bit of vision? Or how about a monorail encircling lake Washington, with feeder lines into the neighborhoods. Sigh. Thing would've been built already, and I still have my first ride token. 21st century letdown.

I HATE driving, I own a car because it is impossible to have children in this city without one,

I really hate this kind of comment. "inconvenient for me because of choices I make about my lifestyle" should never be translated into "impossible". Tens of thousands of households with children in this city are carless. To state the obvious, it can't be "impossible" if people do it.

Mr Council President: Tear Down This Failed Deep Gregoire Tunnel!

Charles - two things - first, I drove from Anacortes to Burien Sunday afternoon, no traffic issues. I then drove from Burien to the U District that same afternoon, traffic was a tiny bit congested but not bad at all.

Second, I heard Saturday was a mess, not sure, but a large part of that mess was the events happening, especially the Rock and Roll Marathon. The resulting traffic issue was not about lack of transit, but about horrible planning between SDOT, WSDOT and Seattle Special events. To schedule that many projects and events the same day is idiotic. We need to improve how the governments communicate and plan. Not that we don't need more transit, but the problems Saturday can't be blamed on lack of transit.

I'll start reading Mudede's posts on density and transit when he informs us that he no longer lives in a single family dwelling. Until then, I'll rely on Dick Cheney lecturing President Obama on how to achieve success in Iraq for my daily dose of irony.

@16 - "Tens of thousands"? Really? Can you cite some source for that? It seems improbable.

The US, like Seattle, has a car-centric infrastructure. Doing normal things, like having children ("lifestyle choice"??) typically require a car. And this is coming from a lifelong semi-militant bicyclist.

Seattle was dumb. 1962 World Fair and the construction of the original monorail... yet in the DECADES since, the City Council/Transport Authorities totally neglected to reserve light-rail right-of-ways (at a minimum) in anticipation of future transit needs.

Now we need transit and we have to fucking retrofit the goddamn city to have anything better than buses.

Fucking stupid. The 1960-1970s City Councils are all hereby retroactively FIRED.

@11, Vancouver WA is not a city. It's a suburb.

19), sorry, walking and transit make up about 90 percent of my getting around town. as for my house, it was made in 1906, is a five-minute walk to link, and is in a diverse neighborhood.

18) but if it is not a marathon, or concert, it is a car accident, or something of the kind. during last week, it was graduations, and so on and so on and so on. but, meinert, a big city is all about events, and the more there are, even in a single day, the better city, the better for business. one only has to use link on the day of a baseball game to see how useful it is to thousands of people to get in and out of town. it is a huge timesaver. so more events, more marathons, but also more public mobility options for normal and extraordinary days.

@20 Agreed. But now I wonder how much of an effect the Boeing Bust of the 1970s had on our currently inadequate infrastructure? Were we defunded at exactly the wrong time?

Overall, the problem with more recent cities, like Seattle and Los Angeles, is that they were developed mostly in the era where individual automobile access was the assumed norm.

Nobody thought it through well enough to anticipate the problems this would cause in the future. Or, worse, the people who did have the foresight to think it through, thought only about what kind of profit their own (car-centric) industry would make in the near term.

Seattle's traffic situation seems untenable -- not just overloaded, but wildly unpredictable. Will it take 20 minutes to get downtown, or two hours? Who knows?

@25 - You're right the the economic climate of the Bust influenced the failure of Forward Thrust (initiatives from '68-'70), but in hindsight I think voters attitudes were coupled with just enough provincialism to shoot it down anyhow.

The Feds were practically giving away mass transit systems (Senator Magnuson has nearly $1B in federal money secured), and Seattle balked. During that same period, Seattle passed a $120M parks levy, rebuilt its sewers, and paid for the Kingdome. I think mass transit just doesn't fit with Seattleites' image of the city—and when it nearly did in the 90's, the city council killed it. Seattle is going to make a helluva case study on transit one day.

And for the record, not bashing my hometown. If we didn't already have BART and MUNI (and radio waves, and a water supply) down here, I can't image what it'd take.

Fun/depressing footnote: Seattle's train money built MARTA in Atlanta.

@27
Vote dates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_Thr…

I don't think that failure of transit was because of Boeing bust -- first failure was in '68 when things great -- but as you say, a large part just a car-centric anti-city culture.

@28 - Housing vacancy rates rose to 16% from 1% in 1967*, I think people saw the writing on the wall by the first vote,—I think we agree about what probably drove them to kill it. I didn't actually live in Seattle until '77, and as a youngin' at that, so... you know.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_…

@11 "However, Portland and (more so) Vancouver have demonstrated that they are in tune with the 21st century understanding that density is deeply incompatible with cars."

How the hell can you read that sentence and think for one second it's about Vancouver, WA? Are they really some bastion of density and transit? I'm with you on the Vancouver/Vancouver annoyance, but look at the context here. This is one of those times where it was absolutely clear to me which Vancouver was being talked about.

@29
I am a bit dubious about this one:
"Housing vacancy rates rose to 16% from 1% in 1967" -- though one explanation might be from lots of apartment building. There was no sense of economic anxiety in 1967 that I remember. That happened very very rapidly after SST killed. Of course I didn't read business pages then.

@31 - Touche. I'd be a fool to argue a point from wikipedia against someone that may have been there.

Does anyone remember what the actual plan for Forward Thrust was? I know it was a rail and bus package, but was in partly underground? What was its reach?

Maybe this guy should stick to writing about booze. This little diatribe is simplistic space filler. I notice he proposes no solutions, not even far-fetched solutions. It's just several paragraphs of whining.

About a decade ago, when the DC transit system was crying poor mouth, The Washington Post published a list of all the transit system's supervisors, managers, senior managers, directors, and executives along with their salaries. It was a real eye opener, not only in terms of their grossly inflated salaries but also because of the sheer number of them. There seemed to be a one-to-one ratio of senior staff to bus drivers.

I would truly love to see someone do this for King County's Metro. I have a feeling we might see the same level of financial atrocity or pretty damn close to it.

If Mudede really wants to take on Metro, there's a place he can start.

@32
I was there and just barely old enough to vote -- and no idea what I did -- oh yes! I remember now! I voted for Transit! I'm a good conventional Slogger! -- and the arguments....I don't remember....I think similar to what people say now: too expensive, doesn't go anywhere, "undesirable" people can go to my neighborhood, communist plot to force people into communes...your basic idiocy.

Seattle isn't flat like Portland, so please stop that comparison. In fact, that whole argument that Seattle isn't as good as Portland because it doesn't have so many dedicated bike streets and streetcars has been blown out of the water enough, because of the radical difference in geography between the two cities, that I'm surprised he's still whining about it.

Seattle has a very tight waistline and only so many lanes across its canal. Yet it's in the top ten of US walkable cities. It's a difficult place to build any kind of transit, and it's an impossible place to build cheap transit. But it's second only to San Francisco in the West for transit riders per capita. It's a really hard city for bicycling, with hills and rain and geographical squeeze plays in all directions. Yet Seattle is full of bicyclists and walkers and electric buses and SmartCars and Priuses.

What kind of wrong side of bed did you emerge from? More whining from The Stranger: what a crappy newspaper!

We need to incentivize employers to get their employees to telecommute. My last jobs are jobs that didn't really have to be at work for, except a couple days a month, and that's only for meetings. People like me who can do work from home / cafe / bar should be encouraged to! Then we wouldn't have to drive to work and be part of the problem 9-5.
Employers like mine in the meantime want everyone to work on site, just for the hell of it, just so they can know that they can interrupt us and our work in person, whenever they want. Something that can be done over phone, skype, or email. And perhaps some bosses just have a sick fixation on WATCHING their employees work.
And sure, I can leave this job, for one I won't have to drive to, but once I do someone else will fill my place and be part of the same problem with our traffic jams. More incentives for bosses to allow more telecommuting!
To A) contribute less to climate change, B) ease the traffic, thereby making this city more bearable, and C) make work happier and more comfortable for more of us. Boosts morale in many ways.

@ 36, having lived in Seattle I had to laugh when they rated Seattle's walkability higher than Denver's. I have walked all over both cities, and there is no way that that is true.

@ 30, in addition, Slog veterans should all know by now that Charles would never deign to mention Vancouver WA in his posts unless the topic was the end of the burbs or some other disparaging topic.

@39: I cede the point to you. Well argued.

Sigh! Seattle did have two chances to build SOMETHING. - the earlier vote that failed - with system money that went to MARTA, and the Monorail. even Phoenix got their 20 mile light rail going before Seattle's light rail. Oh well, cap hill will be on of rail soon.

It's wonderfully ironic that, when it comes to transit, Lefties regard seattle as small minded and provincial, but when it comes to zoning building heights or major initiatives that reflect 'real' cities, they are quick to buttinhale their panties.

Note: The Vancouver and Atlanta referenced built their transit on the backbone of Olympic Games ambitions. (Then they fucking did it.) The whiners about cars will be the FIRST to complain at the notion of hosting the Games.

And, six story height is NOT density justifying the cost of transit infrastructure, without a mechanism to make autos totally untenable (30% car VAT, $8 gas). Why Portland bleeds money, and NYC works. But if a developer proposed 30 story apartments along SLU, Eastlake, Roosevelt, justifying a tube system... The same people fantasizing about Seattle as some eurotopia will be the first to protest true density.

But then again, liberal Seattle also thinks that teachers unions are interested in kids, Hillary is a champion of young women, Obama is concerned about inequality.

Oh you stupid, blinded people.

Oh, and the minute Cap Hill train opens, rents will soar, old buildings will fall, condo owners will replace renters and demand the bums be rousted.

Its called economics. It -- ultimately -- trumps politics.

The Stranger might be able to afford offices in Southcenter in 2022.