Tomorrow is the Grand Opening of Seattle’s latest mass transit boondoggle: Our light rail line.
Seeing as how our senior Senator, Patty “Osama bin Laden builds daycare centers” Murray, was able to get federal funding to build it, you all should pat yourselves on the back for being a part of something such as this. Yes, I know you only gave up the cash when the gun was pointed at your face by the feds, but still.
Today’s quote comes from an article whose subject was the lack of parking at or near the train stations
Light rail was meant to be fed by people taking the bus, walking or biking. It was not meant to be fed by cars.
Rick Sheridan – SDOT (Seattle Department of Transportation) Spokesman
Except that when we were being sold this faulty bill of goods, we were told that it would take tens of thousands of cars off the roads because people wouldn’t have to drive into downtown any more.
Also, there are bus lines that will parallel 90% of the light rail line.
And I’m not even going to mention The Interurban Trail walking and biking path that is actually longer than the entirety of the light rail line. Ooops, there I went and mentioned it.
Once again folks, a big round of applause for yourselves. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.
Of course, we shouldn’t have done it at all.
For more discussion on the lack of parking, see here.
To read a local liberal writing about how lazy people are because they don’t want to have to park and walk a half-mile in the usually drizzly Seattle weather to take the train, see here.
That’s hilarious. You know, mass transit is only beneficial if it benefits the maximum amount of people.
The vast, vast majority of the population that commutes does not live within walking distance of a rail station. Simple as that.
If you say “this is for this neighborhood only, because we want to create neighborhoods,” and provide little to no parking, the people that REALLY want to use it – all the people out there that aren’t within a stone’s throw of the station – won’t use it.
Your social engineering has failed utterly.
Is your goal to have more people use mass transit, or just to BUILD mass transit and have a huge system eating up tax money?
Here in Portland there are lots of small neighborhood stations along the light rail lines – but the vast majority of them have a decent amount of parking, because the vast majority of people using light rail are getting there by car. The farther-flung stations are hubs with LOTS of parking, because the designers understand that, yes, people have to drive their cars to the station.
Cars aren’t evil. If your goal is to get people out of cars, get them out of cars MOST of the day by allowing them to drive a short distance to the train. It’s not rocket science.
This is one of the many reasons I moved away from the Seattle area. The tards in power there, constantly re-elected by tards who just look at the D and get all giddy, don’t care about the real world or real-world results. They care about their moral high-horse and the pie in the sky. So they do things that solve nothing, cost way more than they should, and just demonstrate how short-sighted they are. BUT – they get to point at it and wag their fingers at evil car drivers. Retards.
We recently (finally) started running light rail trains through the Valley of the Sun in and around Phoenix. Remember now, our afternoon temps have been in the 113-117 range. The few stops we have are “open air,” meaning no A/C and little shade while you wait for the train to come, and not even any water fountains. People ride on the “honor system,” which means only idiots pay to ride, because if you get caught riding for free by the Train Nazis, they might go so far as to WRITE YOUR NAME IN THEIR BOOK! The system was poorly designed and goes to very few places “normal” people wish to go, was way behind schedule when it finally opened, and if you want to go to the airport (a destination used to sell the people on this municipal insanity,) there are no provisions for luggage on the trains and you have to de-train at a nearby stop and TAKE A BUS the rest of the way to the airport. Costs were way off the charts before the first supposedly-paying customer ever boarded and fares have been increased twice since Day One (remember what I said about the “honor system?”) And to top it all off, we have had a car-train or pedestrian-train accident nearly every day since it began service. When there is an accident, the system shuts down until they can determine that there has been no damage to the tracks or power lines, which means all the sun-stroked imbeciles who ride the train either have to wait in the heat for the system to begin running again or they have to find alternate transportation (read: take the bus, which these trains were supposed to replace.) I wish we could blame this mess on that “hopey-changey” stuff, but we had our own home-grown Liberal dream gazers come up with this foolishness.
One guy in the Olympian said it simply and fairly comically …… “FINALLY – a train that goes from where I don’t live, to where I don’t work. Shut down the freeways folks, we’re goin green”!