More Social Engineering

The current Mass Transit system in Seattle consists of 98% buses. We have one rail system running between Tacoma and Everett, with Seattle in between, but it is very limited in where you can get on/off and is frequently hampered by mud/land slides, especially during our wet winters.

One of the problems with riding the bus to where you want to go is that, well, someone else is driving and they have a number of other people to transport. One good stretch of repeated bicyclists and/or folks in wheelchairs who want to board and your buss will be hopelessly late for whereever you’re trying to go.

This includes your place of employment.

In fact, one of the largest complaints that people have is that they cannot rely upon the bus system to get them to work on time, and they would just prefer to drive their cars instead anyway, so they do.

One rather uppity pro-transit leftist blogger has the solution: Ezra Basom at the EvergreenPolitics.Com blog says that the cities and the state DOT need to make sure that the buses have preferred treatment in traffic, including, but not limited to:

1.The ability to control intersection signals

2. Bus only streets

3. Bus only lanes on the interstate and high traffic arterials

Basically, making it harder for people in cars to get anywhere. If you already have a commuter-buddy who you ride to work with, you’d better get a couple more, other wise you’ll be stuck in traffic with everybody else, because Ezra would have the “Carpool Lane” designated for buses and vehicles with 4 persons or more only.

Need to get to a business or an appointment on 3rd Ave in downtown Seattle? You had better be taking the bus, my friend. The city is cutting down on parking inside the downtown area and are thinking of cutting off any new licenses for lots or garages (that aren’t run by the city, of course). They are also looking at making 3rd Ave a “Bus Only Zone”.

City officials are also complaining that fewer people are shopping in downtown. Go figure.

Here is the county proposal. A number of Ezra’s suggestions are in there. 49 “Capital Improvements” to the transit system in both the city and in the county areas. Few, if any of them, will have more than a half-assed effect on bus traffic. Most of which will hamper the driving of your personal vehicle.

But by far, the most insipid idea Ezra has is to give control of the street lights to the buses. The state pays people hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out the best way to program the stoplights so as to get the largest number of people through all directions of an intersection. Ezra would toss all that down the drain to cut an extra couple of mintes off the commute for a few dozen people.

I can’t find it right this second, but a couple weeks back a poster at another of the local left-wing sites was whining about how “Roads Cause Traffic”. After I stopped laughing I made sure to let them know that their premise was false in the same way that my keyboard does not cause me to misspell werds.

Traffic in this area is going to be so fucked.