Recluse reflections

Recluse reflections: "Allentown" streetcar chugs on. Will monorail activists embrace it?
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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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

"Allentown" streetcar chugs on. Will monorail activists embrace it?

The Seattle Times reports that streetcar plans are moving along: "The Seattle City Council took the first step yesterday to create a special tax district that would charge property owners $25 million to build a 1.3-mile streetcar line in the South Lake Union area."

It will be interesting to hear how monorail proponents react to this news. Many of them have been highly critical of any transit plan that doesn't run on a raised concrete viaduct. I've heard several speakers at televised SMP meetings deride this proposal, calling it the "Allentown streetcar" since Paul Allen's development company is expected benefit handsomely from the line if it's ever built.

This has always struck me as one of the more surprising aspects of local monorail activism. I'd expect a group like the monorail activists to be excited about other transit systems that could tie into their favorite proposal. The proposed route for the South Lake Union streetcar would abut the monorail's proposed Westlake station. It would, presumably, add riders for both of the mass-transit systems -- light rail and monorail -- at Westlake.

This proposal strikes me as a good way to handle the development that is happening in the area anyway. Streetcars, like the ones now running in Portland and Tacoma, aren't any faster than buses. They're not meant to be rapid transit systems. But they are consistently more popular and more effective at getting folks out of cars than bus systems running on the same routes. (See this report [.pdf document] from a city-financed study on the issue that cites a 500% ridership spike after Tacoma's streetcar replaced a bus route on the same alignment.)

The streetcar proposal with its associated development and zoning changes would expand potential ridership for rapid transit systems like light rail and the proposed monorail. It's something that I'd expect transit activists to embrace.

But we don't often hear monorail activists celebrating that kind of synergy. It's as if they can only see one solution for one set of problems. And that's the most unfortunate aspect of this whole mess we've gotten ourselves into with the monorail. The energy and the money that has been spent for monorail might have brought us closer to real transit solutions if it had been expended on a more wholistic approach. It's too bad it didn't happen and we're likely to pay for it for decades to come.
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