Recluse reflections

Recluse reflections: Monorail short line doesn't make sense
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

author

Robin Evans
Seattle

blogroll

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Monorail short line doesn't make sense

The revised short line proposed yesterday by the Seattle Monorail Project board doesn't make much sense at this point.

The new $5 billion-ish monorail short line would be 10.5 miles long instead of the originally-proposed 14-mile route which was supposed to cost $1.7 billion (See this PI .pdf). But the last few miles of the new route seem to exist only as a way to get the trains to a service facility at the Interbay industrial area.

Unfortunately, getting the trains to their garage would still require construction of a new view-blocking viaduct along Second Avenue between downtown and the waterfront and another viaduct across Seattle Center.

The north end of the new route serves the same group of riders who could already ride downtown on the existing monorail. The new route would add a station and shave a few blocks off the walk to the existing EMP station, but is it worth it?

The south end of the route from West Seattle to downtown would be a new quick-transit alternative to existing cross-bridge bus traffic, but even that general area is served by an existing mass-transit alternative to buses.

During the summer, a water-taxi serves commuters between the downtown waterfront and West Seattle, with bus connections to Alaska Junction. It's a twelve-minute commute between the two docks.

Could that water taxi be made more efficient if some of the money thrown at the monorail had been spent on this service? Probably. Could it ever serve as many people as a rail solution would have? Probably not.

But these are the kinds of alternatives that might have been considered if some of the multi-millions spent on this monorail boondoggle had instead been spent on rational considerations of transportation alternatives. We jumped on a solution before we fully understood the problems and the possible alternatives.

It was a mistake. And the only way to fix it now is to vote against this latest iteration of the monorail plan-for-a-plan.

Technorati tags: Seattle monorail Seattle Monorail Project Seattle Boondoggle

posted by WebWrangler | 11:51 AM | Link | 0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment