I like your photos, Charles.

Back in the early 2000's (long time ago, right?), when the building of the light rail was still being hotly debated, and it kept getting shot down, only to rise again from the grave (the pre-Slog Stranger had a great cartoon about this), The Stranger was hotly against the idea, which was really Greg Nickel's baby, and fervently in favor of the monorail system. Like most liberal Stranger readers, I shared this view - a colossal waste of money, it'll just get stuck in traffic because it's not off the ground like the monorail, etc. When it finally got built (and after The Establishment had killed the monorail, for good), we made fun of it as "the train to nowhere", because it originally only went to Tukwila, and who would want to go to Tukwila?

Now, all these years later, the train finally goes to the airport, it gets used a ton by a bunch of commuters and airport travelers who prefer it to the bus service because it IS faster, more comfortable, and cleaner, and Tukwila, a thriving and multicultural community is most definitely not nowhere. I myself use the light rail to commute Downtown five, sometime six days a week. I could take the bus, but the light rail is much better. Living close to a station, like I do, is considered an asset. And now The Stranger can't hope to build extensions all over the place fast enough. Nobody remembers, or wants to remember, those days when the light rail represented all that was wrong with local government. It's okay to be wrong.