MISCmedia for 5/4/01
Saving Transit from the Transit Planners

THE SOUND TRANSIT LIGHT RAIL SCHEME, approved by tri-county voters back during the Clinton years when Fed bucks for local transit projects were much more feasible to attain, is unraveling fast.

It was first promised to go from Northgate Mall to Sea-Tac Airport by 2004. Now the professional transit planners say they can't meet their most recent promises of a U District to Sea-Tac line by 2009. They suggest the politicians tell them which segment to build first: Either downtown to U District (with that way-costlee subway tunnel under Capitol Hill) or downtown to South Lander (by Sears). The rest of the plan will have to wait until the following decade, or until the Democrats retake the White House, or both.

Right now, many of the Powers That Be in the downtown biz establishment apparently want to trash the whole rail scheme. Their hired guns on the newspaper editorial pages are issuing forth increasingly shrill screeds against Sound Transit.

They're not--yet--directly calling for the abandonment of public transport and a return to full-bore highway-building. No, they're just calling for "further study" of the rail plan. And in the jargon of Seattle governance, "further study" is a well-known euphemism for euthenasia.

My suggestion: Save transit. Dump the planners.

Start from scratch with the Monorail Initiative. Build the whole thing above ground so folk will more likely want to ride on it. Offer riders a chance to sit back and enjoy some local scenery instead of cooping them up in some hole in the ground.

At the very least, replace the subway portion with an above-ground or ground-level route north from downtown.

Above-ground isn't as cheap as surface trains but far cheaper than tunnels, as well as potentially more popular. It also would provide a new, tourist-friendly visual icon to the cityscape.

(Further arguments for sky-riding can be found at the Friends of the (Seattle) Monorail site.)

NEXT: Words, who needs 'em?

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