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Comment by eksu | Hacker News Reader

How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit.

Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.

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Quality of life down for most drivers, maybe. But by focusing on transit, moving around and in/out of the city becomes a lot easier for more people than it becomes worse for, so I'd say overall quality of life goes way up.

Best of luck to you in your new city :)

I just experimented on Google Maps with an arbitrary route: random place near Microsoft campus to a random nice park in Seattle: 1hr30 minutes.

Car: 23 minutes. Even during the awful 520 rush hour, it's still ~15-30min faster.

> in/out of the city becomes a lot easier for more people than it becomes worse for

Pretty hard to imagine losing 2hrs on a round-trip into the city is a benefit for anyone that can't afford to live in the city proper.

Fair enough, but I take measurements like these as a need to further improve transit. For example, the light rail reaching Redmond should help that particular route a lot.

In general, it doesn't make sense to invest in making it easier for cars as the population grows — it's not as sustainable as improving transit, since public transit is a far more efficient way to transport people.

That estimation may change in the coming decades. Self driving cars would allow for pooling and far greater car throughput on existing roads (no human latency/error, synchronized top speeds)

Even if self-driving cars were perfect and every manufacturer came out with one tomorrow, it would still be 20 or 30 years before the existing cars on the road were all replaced. To say nothing of the decades of R&D that will be required starting now in order to get us to that point.

I think it's naive to suggest this as an alternative when we could have working mass transit systems using proven equipment within a decade. Why would we wait for what might come when we could have something better today?

Nah, it's literally one express freeway bus. That's what's so great about Seattle public transit.

Hmm? 545 from Overlake or the Redmond Transit Center? I’m not sure what would necessitate a stop in Bellevue.

You've managed to choose an arbitrary route that is an extremely uncommon commute and one of the worst possible commutes into the city. You're also neglecting time to find parking and the cost to park (and as long as we're mentioning costs, gas, insurance, and wear and tear on the car).

Absolutely agree. Traffic in Seattle is some of the absolute worst in the country. 25% of workers drive to work only because there isn't even enough room on the road to fit more of them. Getting around Seattle is a massive pain in the ass and public transit just isn't keeping up.

To me, this is just evidence to expand public transit even more. There's only so much road space, and as the population grows we need to more efficiently utilize it – busses and rail are some of the most efficient ways. While we always need to support some car use cases, public transit is really the long-term solution to traffic.

I agree that more transit is necessary, but the city just hasn't been keeping up. They are making it harder for cars without providing viable alternatives.

I would love to have good public transit, but being someone who bused from 2008 until 2015 it will never happen.

Busses in the city are plagued by our homeless. A lot of the busses simply don't feel safe, especially if you're a female traveling solo.

The exception to the rule seems to be the 'commuter' busses, double deckers that go to park and rides straight downtown, but park and rides are full by 6:30 with not enough parking, and service is limited.

Connecting busses out of county (Community Transit, Gnomish county) sucks, no service out of 9-5 hours Monday through Friday. Total roundtrips for most people start at 2 hours and go up to 4 (my commute to college and home).

Ultimately, the buses are torn between two opposing causes: serving disadvantaged members of the community by being cheap and helping people commute at odd hours, or serving mass commuters that work downtown, and it fails at both.

> Commuter buses … pay for the city buses that serve the disadvantaged

This is actually the opposite of the truth. Commuter buses are far more expensive routes to run due to both the distance (wear and tear, fuel) and the deadhead (empty) return trips. City routes cost far less to run per head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_County_Metro#Operating_co...

> Metro's higher-than-average cost per boarding can be at least partially attributed to its high percentage of commuter routes, which run at peak hours only, and often only in one direction at a time. As of 2011, 100 of Metro's 223 routes are peak-only. These routes require significant deadheading (particularly on the one-way routes), as well as a very large part-time labor force, both of which drive up costs.[29]

> Metro's lowest-cost route overall, route 4 (East Queen Anne to Judkins Park), had a cost per boarding of only $0.46 during peak hours in 2009. By way of contrast, Metro's peak-only route with the lowest cost per boarding was route 206 (Newport Hills to International School), at $2.04. Metro's highest cost route by this measure, route 149 (Renton Transit Center to Black Diamond), had a peak time cost of $34.47 per boarding. Route 149 serves the rural southeastern corner of King County.[30]

For the direct source, check out this PDF: http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/reports/2009/2009-RtPerf.pdf

Starting on page 24 (20 in the document), you can see look at "Fare Rev. / Op. Exp. Ratio." The "West Subarea" is the city of Seattle; the East and South subareas are suburbs. You can see that the aggregate fare recovery per operating expenses is much higher in Seattle than in routes serving the suburbs.

It sure as shit doesn't fail me when I'm commuting home from downtown at 1:00 in the morning after a concert.

Where are you going to move to? Every big metro area in North America that is significantly geographically constrained has horrendous traffic: SF, NY, Boston, Vancouver, ...

Ideally Boise, potentially Salt Lake City or Bozeman or Spokane or Denver. Mountain West.

If you or someone you know is hiring College Graduates in these areas, drop me a line.

Fair warning, Denver may not be Seattle bad, but people are moving here at a crazy clip and traffic continues to degrade as we fail to see improvements in roads or mass transit to effectively offset the growth. And with the possibility Amazon HQ2 landing here it may only get worse.

As a Redmond resident who,has investigated getting out, I sincerely wish you luck. I’ve kept an eye out in Idaho and Montana, and though the jobs are there, the pickin’s are slim. Denver or SLC might be a better shot for the first job, and more importantly, the second job when the first doesn’t work out.

Thankfully I’ve recently landed work in Bellevue (as opposed to Yet Another Pioneer Square Startup), so maybe I can hold off for a while longer. Love Redmond, but a lot of the work is across the lake. And, no, I’m not moving to Seattle.

I don't know a single person who drives in Manhattan, except people who live in Queens... There's no need. The subway is fine, occasional delays and all.

Apparently, you have never driven in another major city? Have you tried the commute to Chicago? There is a reason >300,000 people there take the metra trains every day to downtown.

Yup. Seattle is terrible compared to some hypothetical ideal that doesn't exist anywhere in reality. Portland? LA? San Francisco? Chicago? New York? Driving in any major city in the US during rush hour is an unmitigated nightmare. Seattle doesn't have the geography to add a bunch of a bypass highways or to increase the number of lanes on major highways (even if those things helped), building out transit is the only way things get better.

Hypothetically speaking, given the tremendous expense of accommodating cars and the necessary ridership needed to get public transit working well (e.g. the greater the bus ridership, the more routes & times), I could imagine this actually being a rational step in moving a population over to mass transit.

The population is increasing, so car commutes are going to get worse no matter what the city government does.

Are there any specific actions Seattle has taken to make the driving experience worse?

I think it's more a question of what they haven't done as the city has grown. If you increase the populace, but don't increase the amount of roads and parking, driving gets worse. (I'm not arguing that that's a bad thing.)

And if you don't build complete neighborhoods and/or allow enough housing near where people work.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/6/complete-neighb...

Yes. Approval of an insane number of construction sites in downtown core has lead to absolute gridlock, the removal of lanes on arterial roads for wider bike lanes, and the 405 toll lane are the first which come to mind.

Are you suggesting the city approved building permits to discourage driving?

I think what he's saying is that the city has enabled unchecked population growth, and this has hurt quality of life for those already living here, who have put down roots, and been paying their taxes. This is plainly true - the ever increasing height limits in South Lake Union, rezoning of various neighborhoods, etc. has made it much harder to get around as density increases and shared resources (e.g. roads, parks, etc.) become vastly over-subscribed.

Ugh, that 405 change is almost enough to have me start an armed rebellion. Not only did it make traffic worse, as a motorcyclist it made my commute far more dangerous because they couldn’t be bothered to spend money for even the most trivial of barriers. Even the car drivers are scared, because they all huddle in the left HOT lane. It is one of the few public projects that blatantly appears to involve some degree of graft.

Are you suggesting the city of Seattle has any control over 405? I agree that the 405 toll lane(s) are awful, just not on the part about Seattle's culpability.

You're confusing the City of Seattle with WSDOT.

Interstate 405 toll lanes, turning two way roads into one way roads to add a bicycle lanes in many places, lowering arterial speeds from 30 to 25mph and in downtown streets from 25 to 20mph.

The 405 toll lanes originally removed capacity on off peek hours by removal of the HOV lanes, until pushback had them undo it. 2 person HOV was removed.

The way the WADOT has been measuring success of the toll lanes is by polling people at the Bellevue Transit Center to find out if they are now taking the bus because of the toll lanes.

What part of 405 is in Seattle?

I have been commuting through downtown the last couple weeks and while traffic is heavy it's totally manageable.

Yes, lots of actions. I'll name just a few but this is FAR from exhaustive:

- They have eliminated car lanes in favor of bike lanes that are typically not highly utilized - even in neighborhoods far from the downtown core, street parking is being eliminated for bike lanes, and is making even simple tasks hard and hurting quality of life (e.g. taking the kids to the dentist but not being able to park anywhere nearby).

- They have reduced speed limits in many places and therefore added travel time everywhere. This includes thoroughfares obviously designed for high throughput (e.g. WA-522, Lake City Way).

- Next month, the main on-ramp at Mercer Avenue onto I-5 will begin to be metered, which is going to be incredibly painful given that traffic is already super bad on Mercer (as always they are claiming it will "improve safety").

I don't know why this comment died, it's accurate.

If you disagree with the parent comment, give your viewpoint on why this isn't the case or these changes were good.

Account is probably dead-banned. Other comments are relevant but dead as well.

Many lanes on important highways and connecting streets downtown are being made bus-only all the time, when they really should be Bus+Carpool or allow regular car usage outside peak hours.

I'm really hoping you're moving to LA so you can experience what real traffic hell looks like.

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