Re: Please keep the floppies...Seattle buses...still best
So spending upwards of $20B ( when you factor in financing costs) to knock maybe 10/15 mins off a journey from the U District downtown with a light rail system that has only half the passenger carrying capacity of the express bus line it replaced is a good use of public transit money? Really? On what is not even the most heavily used travel route in Seattle.
One of the cheapest and most practical plans discussed 30 years ago was to expand the bus tunnel system. To U District and a whole bunch of other places as well. Not only would we have got a much cheaper system (by at least $15B) with much lower running costs but the bus tunnel would have had at least 3x / 4x the passenger capacity of light rail (per hour). But not enough graft in buses and the transit "activists" love to play with trains.
The only thing "special" thing about the US is that most European public transit systems could not be built under the regulatory regimes now current in most US states. Except at horrific cost. Lets ignore the utter insanity of CEQA in California. Which makes it almost impossible to build any viable infrastructure except at 10x / 20x the cost of any European state. WA is not far behind .
The cost of just the "Environmental Impact" Report process for the 520 bridge replacement was greater than the cost of just building the old bridge again from scratch. About $300M. The new bridge now had to support light rail and bunch of other transit fads. Even though light rail made zero sense and there already was a dedicated HOV bus lane on the bridge for decades and all the way back to the 405 and Bellevue. Not that you saw many busses on it as its a low ridership route.
To pick one example from Europe. The light rail system as built in Toulouse in France could not have been build in the US in the time and budget it was built in. Multiply each by a factor of 4 or 5 minimum. So you would have ended up with a much smaller system. If any at all. IN a few decades time.
And we wont even talk about the final cost of the new 520 bridge $6B+?. Or the fact the toll to try to pay for it has increased traffic on the Mercer Island bridge few 100%. Or the Mercer Island Bridge light rail fiasco. Yeah, going to be lots of Mercer Island folk using the light rail. Lets reduce the bridge traffic capacity for a tiny light-rail ridership.
Seattle had a great well thought out and integrated transit system back in the 1990's. It was cheap to run an very efficient for daily traffic loads in the Greater Seattle area. In the last 20 years they have spent or committed to spending almost $100B in debt for a system that adds no effective extra passenger carrying capacity over what they had 30 years ago. All extra capacity added in the last two decades to the system is due to extra buses
As I said a monumental waste of money. Just like light rail in San Jose, Los Angeles and now Portland. Light rail works in very high density urban cores with very strong local journey patterns. Which none of these cities have. Ever been to "downtown" San Jose. It makes Basingstoke look like a big city. And LA....
For low and moderate density urban areas with diffuse daily journey flows buses are the best solution. And the only efficient solution. Which is what I thought traffic engineering was all about. Not pandering to urban life style fantasies of a very small very affluent group of urban / transit "activists"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
