Notes on spaces seen through windows
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| Recluse reflections: Monorail board: Stop whining Notes on spaces seen through windows |
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Wednesday, September 21, 2005 Monorail board: Stop whining
According to the PI, monorail board members are whining about not having enough time to do things right:Three years of fully funded planning (six years, overall) isn't enough time to come up with a rational affordable contribution to the area's transportation needs? While it's true that things take a long time to get going in Seattle, what they've managed to come up with in six years is an irrational pipedream that threatens to make traffic worse. They've had too much time. They've wasted too much money already. It's time to stop it. Now. I watched on Seattle Channel while of group of consultants SMP had hired to evaluate their line presented a summary. The summary sounded like a campaign presentation. The softball questions from the board were even worse. One board member asked the consultant who was speaking for the group to amplify on a suggestion that this thing could be a world-class system. I'm used to watching City Council committee meetings where these sorts of presentations would also draw a flurry of softball questions, but there would always be someone (usually McKiver or Conlin) who would gently, and almost apologetically ask a zinger (relative to to these sorts of things, of course). The SMP consultant seemed to be begging for the zinger. Two or three times he repeated that they hadn't been asked to consider the technology that had been adopted and added caveats like "given the technology that was adopted". The obvious question that wasn't asked by a single board member was this: "We didn't ask you to consider the technology, but did you talk about it anyway? Do you think we could have come up with a better solution using something other than monorail technology?" They didn't ask because they didn't want to know. This project was always a technology in search of a problem. And that's our collective fault as voters. We're the ones who insisted on funding this silly pipedream until it had too much bureaucratic mass to be stopped. It was always backwards from the start. It started out with a vote that essentially asked "Lookie here, kids, wouldn't it be nifty if we had a monorail just like the Jetsons?" And the vote passed while Sound Transit was mired in its darkest days. But then it spawned a movement that built on itself. It was never about the kinds of boring (and tunneling) transportation studies that Sound Transit was "wasting" money on. A movement can't be built on a transportation study. But it could, in a traffic-clogged city, be built on an ill-considered 60s-era image of cartoonish trains swooshing along on impossibly thin and tall stilts. So we voted to tax ourselves to build a system to somewhere without knowing much about why it was needed where it would be going or if it was the best way to get there. We voted for a plan that would have been laughed off the ballot if it had been presented to us by politicians. Is it possible that transporation problems between Crown Hill and downtown or between West Seattle and downtown could be better solved with a bus rapid-transit system? Maybe. But we don't know because SMP never did that kind of study. Would elevated light-rail bridges (like that oh-so-elegant bridge in Vancouver) cause less visual blight than a monorail's bridges with its massive single track? Maybe. But we don't know because SMP never did that kind of study. Would it be cheaper and less visually distracting to build switches for a light-rail system? Maybe. But we don't know because, when SMP realized they'd need to build several huge switches on their system, it was too late to consider that option. Are there places along SMP's chosen route where an on-grade system would be cheaper to build but equally efficient? Maybe. But we don't know because that kind of study wasn't done. There's a whole lot we don't know. We don't even know if the route chosen by SMP is the most effective way to contribute to solving the area's overall transportation problems. Does this system discourage car ownership in Seattle? According to their SMP's own planners, it does not. The board was assured by a hired consultant that car ownership in Seattle will increase after SMP's system is built. Their consultant didn't utter a word about "transit oriented development" -- the kind of thing that is supposed to decrease car ownership. And the board thanked the consultant profusely for his presentation. The Seattle Monorail Project was always a technology in search of a problem. Now it has become a project that is a big part of the problem. They've had too much time. They've spent too much money. It's time to stop. Technorati tags: Seattle monorail Seattle Monorail Project Seattle Boondoggle posted by WebWrangler | 2:27 AM | Link | 1 comments
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