Recluse reflections

Recluse reflections: What's next for monorail route?
Notes on spaces seen through windows

"But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all this too quite differently disposed."
-- Samuel Beckett

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Robin Evans
Seattle

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Wednesday, November 09, 2005

What's next for monorail route?

The question that monorail activists were asking last night after their pet project went down to a decisive defeat is, "What's next?" That's good. They've long insisted that they were interested mostly in finding good transportation solutions for at least a part of Seattle, so we should hope that some of them will redirect their energies to finding those solutions.

Not surprisingly, the fiery Cleve Stockmeyer, who also lost his reelection bid to stay on the SMP board, was most expressive:

Stockmeyer stood before the crowd of about 100 monorail supporters and tore up a map of Seattle, separating the west half from the east.

"The (city) leadership has decided (the west) half of Seattle doesn't count," Stockmeyer said. "There's no plan for that half of Seattle to get to the other half. This is a battle we're losing, but the big unanswered questions what is Plan B?"

Of course, the city leadership hasn't decided that the west half of Seattle "doesn't count". In its current round of budget discussions, the City Council has repeatedly mentioned the need to do something for West Seatttle if the monorail were to fail.

Neither has Sound Transit or King County Metro decided that the city's western half that would have been served by SMP's project "doesn't count".

But all of those agencies were blocked by SMP's own refusal to face the reality of its failed dream. While SMP continued to limp along on hopes and dreams, the areas that its mapped routes crossed were off limits to other plans.

It was SMP that ripped the map of Seattle apart with its irrational and, in the end, unbuildable plans. Now it's up to others to fix the problems that SMP and its proponents created.

Something else can now be done. It will require more studies, more planning, and more money. And, since hundreds of millions were wasted on a failed plan, neighborhoods like Ballard and West Seattle will now have to stand in a long line of neighborhood petitioners for transit solutions. They will no longer have a dedicated revenue stream from throughout the city to support their neighborhoods. But they will have something, and the studies (which is what they'll have to make do with for now) will probably start flowing off consultants workstations pretty quickly.

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