How Seattle blew its chance at a subway system (2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States

The project got stomped by NIMBY complaints by Old Louisville residents (neighborhood between Downtown and most of those other destinations; and dumb because that OG suburb was built on the backs of once important trolley lines to/from Downtown), and internecine battles with the Commonwealth legislature and KIPDA the "regional transit oversight authority".

(KIPDA seems to have no real authority other than conservatively shutting down TARC projects because it's too much work to actually collaborate with Southern Indiana and neither state understands the benefits of actually enhancing transit in the region because of a sort of cold war between the two, despite the shared interests in the region. But I'm ranting…)

Anyway, fast forward 15 years after the project was cancelled and the region is losing a battle with Nashville and Indianopolis for major regional business conventions (which is probably the biggest money fight between the cities). Louisville has the conference space and hotel inventory space to stay extremely competitive, _except_ that it's spread out across the central corridor: the Downtown Convention Center is "small", but well appointed and surrounded by hotel space; the Fairgrounds is huge with tons of space, and some more hotels, and relatively convenient to the airport. Getting between the two takes about 15/20 minutes in light traffic. The proposed LRT could probably have done it in about the same with proposed stops, if not faster.

The kicker is, though, that the one convention actually trying to utilize all that space in the same convention, manages to nearly grid lock the entire core corridor for the entirety of the convention. What's a 15/20 minute drive most days becomes an hour and a half crawl.

The foresight was there to build LRT before it was needed. It's just stupid that project was killed for political reasons. Now it's incredibly needed and even tougher to get political traction to actually build it.

It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do.

That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.

I rarely have it stop anywhere on Rainier, but when it does it takes so long for something that already takes forever. I live south of Seattle and it takes me 45 minutes to get home on the light rail where a bus will take 20 -- unfortunately the bus I need doesn't run on weekends so I have to take the light rail.

If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often.

If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro.

[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...

You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.

It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now.

There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges.

I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.

What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.

Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.

Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision.

As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable;

1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%)

2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs

3) Better for the disabled

4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.

The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.

Respectfully, could not disagree more. The more urban development there is, the harder these things get to build. It's probably impossible to do nowadays, and Seattle is a cesspit of traffic, even compared to other US cities. As far as maintenance or upgrades, please. Why do you brush your teeth?

Finally, can you measure quality of life, and if so, how much money is it worth? It's shameful that it's always an economic argument, usually by people who are already well-off. The list of benefits for mass rapid transit is endless, and at the end of the day, it's Americans who suffer for not having it, nobody else (except with environmental concerns, i.e. global warming).

I don't think that's what it means. Don't think about the actual costs, think about when you pay the costs and when you reap the benefit. People want to enjoy the benefits with as little effort or sacrifice from their side.

- Most people aren't willing to be the ones to have to pay any cost, they'd rather have others do it.

- Most people would like to enjoy a benefit as soon as possible, so they'd rather have others put that in place in advance.

Combine these 2 and you get the picture: a person today doesn't want to pay for something and even worse, only get it in a decade or more. Any other discomfort just gets piled on an already unfavorable situation.

https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/king/

Its a democracy, vote for better ppl.

This is local propaganda by the large corporations here and Saul Spady running around whining on 5pm TV news about having to spend more money in taxes when he's enjoyed nothing but a booming Seattle restaurant industry directly due to the laws he opposed. Everything goes on the people because the businesses here don't really pay anything and those same people who complain about their taxes going up willingly defend not taxing the corporations reaping major benefits here. The tax system is also extremely regressive. Not to mention the public shows no backlash against giving $100's of millions of dollars of public taxpayer money to dumb shit like repairing Safeco Field when the owners and Mariners could've paid for it themselves.

Seattle is a fiscally right wing city, not this 'socialist hell hole' everyone makes it out to be.

The mailbox was less than 50 feet from the frontdoor.

You can't generalize this to all Americans, as it largely seems to be localized to the Baby Boomer generation, who were responsible for roughly 2/3rds of automobile sales in 2011. There's an Autoweek article[1] that tries to spin this positively, but it basically says that Millennials and Gen-Z are responsible for just 30% of vehicle sales in 2017. Essentially, people ages 18-35 are purchasing less than a third of the vehicles, despite being at a position in their lives where a demand should be at its highest.

Complicating matters, it looks like the market research pointing to millennials essentially purchasing them merely out of pragmatic necessity, to drive to work or cart families around because there are no other options: Makes sense, because that's how the Baby Boomers shaped most of our metro areas. They're less car "owners" and more car hostages. As boomers die off, their economic and political power will wane and we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes to urban and suburban landscapes.

[1] https://autoweek.com/article/car-news/bucking-trends-milleni...

To give those numbers some context, when Seattle's Link Light Rail builds out ST2 in 2021, capacity will be 14.4K per hour; and this is running a ordinary schedule of every four minutes.

The New York City Subway at its busiest scheduled section runs much longer trains every two minutes, at a capacity of 75K per hour. That's with 1930's signalling - with modern signalling, they could run trains every 90 seconds, for a capacity of 100k per hour. And that's just on two tracks.

Cars are really space inefficient because you need an engine and a fuel tank for a small group of people. Trains and buses have the advantage of fitting more seats in the same area, and then having people stand on top of that.

https://www.businesstoday.in/current/world/china-successfull...

BTW, I voted for it so I'm aware, I just find it hard to believe it's so borderline and there's folks who seem really angry they need to contribute to the community's well-being. But hey, I guess as someone else said, no one likes to pay taxes.

> technically

It would be orders of magnitude cheaper for ST to buy them than to create new right-of-way. And I haven't seen a train on them for decades, ever since they tore up where it crossed over I405 in Bellevue.

>Imagine a plate of fruit-filled gelatin dessert. Tunnels are like the pieces of fruit at the base of the gelatin, while above-ground structures are like the fruit toward the top. If you shake the plate, the movement becomes more exaggerated as it flows up from the base of the gelatin. In an earthquake, this translates to tunnel movement measured in inches, while the movement above ground might be measured in feet.