Seattle a mass transit basket case

[depakid]

The transportation yahoos in the Emerald City can't figure out how to get light rail across the 520 Bridge. They've been paralyzed for years over what to do with the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Seattle Monorail Project, designed to connect downtown with Ballard and West Seattle, imploded after its booster club spent millions of dollars and condemned dozens of properties.

And the city's international airport won't have light-rail service until late 2009, or eight years after the first MAX cars rolled into PDX.

But if Seattle can't get a grip when it comes to mass transit, it clearly has a sense of humor: May I present the South Lake Union Trolley, which connects Westlake Center's Fantasy Unlimited sex shop and the Hooters at Chandler's Cove, and -- not surprisingly -- goes by the charming acronym, "the S.L.U.T."

Seattle does so many things well -- notably clam strips, ferry rides, tattoo expos and farming out first-ballot Hall-of-Famers to baseball towns with serious World Series' aspirations -- that it's entertaining to find something that the city does so much worse than Portland.

Seattle is such a mass transit basket case that the S.L.U.T. -- a 1.3-mile jaunt through the future Vulcan Empire -- may be its crown jewel.

The $51 million trolley has certainly generated the best T-shirts: Kapow! Coffee has sold thousands of "Ride the S.L.U.T." shirts, profiting mightily over local annoyance with the wholesale redevelopment of one of the city's oldest neighborhoods.

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf?/base/news/12182451433000.xml&coll=7

[Ediacara]

1. Although the things he writes are true, it's obviously written by someone whos only experience....

....with Seattle comes in the form of an Atlas...

ON EDIT:

To expand on this point....

1) Light rail was not on the table for SR-520 any time soon. The initial plan (and as far as I know, still the plan) is to have light rail go across the I-90 bridge to downtown Bellevue, then follow the Bel-Red/520 corridor into downtown Redmond. Light rail on 520 is a phase 3+ improvement, not a phase 2 improvement.

2) The monorail plan collapsed because it was competing for the same dollars to build the same routes as light rail. One plan had to die or be greatly modified for the other to be built, and it was light rail that eventually won out instead of the monorail. The whole monorail experience delayed light rail by almost a decade....

3) The SLUT's actual name is the South Lake Union Streetcar. Although, the other acronym is common. Additionally, the 1.3 mile line is just the beginning of a big network of local in-city streetcar lines that are going to be built (which is what the monorail should have been modified as: short-distance in-town transit that goes where light rail doesn't).

Which is not to say that Seattle is doing things right. It isn't, and hasn't been. A lot of headaches could have been avoided if the light rail and monorail teams worked together to form a unified network of long haul light rail and short haul monorail routes. But they didn't.