Comments

1
I think drivers should be first in line to support transit subsidies since it helps shift cars off the road. There is no need for you personally to ever ride transit in order to benefit from its construction.
2
This is obvious, of course.

Moreover, local businesses should be all over this. Shorter commutes = more productivity.
3
I've been arguing this for years. Drivers should love busses (and other transit) even if you never ride them. Every bus you see = 50 less cars on the road. Drivers should be falling all over themselves to subsidize transit.
4
So a complete failure of a trillion dollar fixed guideway rail on the busiest line in the nation results in a mere 30 minutes additional drive time (on the first day and not allowing for motorists to adjust habits)?
5
I read that article this morning and wondered where an extra 30k people would even begin to think about parking in or around the city.
6
@4: Firstly, way to randomly apply a price tag to a 150-year-old stretch of rail. Making shit up is always so persuasive.

Secondly, the result is an hour to go 22 freaking miles, between two small cities, and through the type of distant-suburban sprawl that could be easily described as Bailo-land.

You truly are a moron for the ages, Bailo.
7
It stuns me that we have to have this conversation at this point in history. It's as if we live in the land of Forget, and truths that have been establish by historical experience in many places have to be championed again and again against the complaints of economically selfish.
8
#7

It stuns me that in an era where the suburbs continue to grow and flourish, where broadband and social media are entertainment, where safe automobiles will some become automated Google cars and where the whole world is shifting to pollution free hydrogen, that I live in the supposedly leading edge metro of Seattle where the primary technology company makes a GUI for desktops, where every is obsessed with choo choo trains and batteries, and cramming people into 250 ft apodments.

It is like the first became last and it hasn't realized it. Seattle is now the place you go from to get 1G fiber in Lawrence Kansas!
9
Everyone should pay for public transit. We all benefit from it. Those of us who can find jobs within walking distance of our homes included.
10
#9

Maybe if they hadn't spent 20 years and billions to create a train that only serves one small part of Seattle people would want to pay for transit.
11
Every time I read some troll's attack on transit subsidies, I wish for a short (3-4 days) transit strike. Every bus and train shuts down for a few days. I believe the results would confirm what most commenters have said here -- public transit is a Good Thing, subsidies and all.
12
#11

Every time I read someone referring to a cogent, but oppositional argument as a troll, my cerebral cortex shuts down.
13
Never understood why so many automobile owners view funding transit with such contempt. Next time they're stuck behind a bus, they should visualize each and every passenger driving a car of their own.
14

And another thing.

Smug infographic videos on YouTube with indie rock background music.

15
This is what happens when transit gets cut - the commute gets intolerable for all automobile drivers and commercial drivers are heavily impacted.

Or if you build an expensive tunnel that solves fewer problems than the previous viaduct did, with dramatically lower vehicle capacity and no transit capacity. You know, the SR-99 Tunnel approach.

Both lead to disaster.
16
@14 aww, is grandpa unable to grok vids?
17
Transit users should pay the full cost of their trips, just like car drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Get your hands out of my wallet, fuckwits.
18
People want the things, but they don't want to pay for the things. They want the bridge, but they don't want to pay a toll. They want the road, but they don't want to pay taxes to maintain it. They don't want to wait in traffic on the subsidized roads they don't want to pay for, but they don't want to subsidize buses either. They want cheap parking and cheap gas and no taxes and no parking tickets.
19
@17 - But how do you define the "whole cost of the trip?" Upcoming maintenance on a section of Interstate 5 through downtown Seattle is budgeted at $150M, only a fraction of a percent of which is being paid for by the gas tax. Should drivers be asked to cover the rest out of pocket, or should we chalk it up to—like transit funding—the price we all pay to keep our area functional?
20
"Just like car drivers pay the full cost of their trips."

This is intentional self-parody, right?
21
@17: Get your child abuse out of my politics, dorkwad.
22
You know what will be really fun? When I'm forced to buy a car because these cuts reduce bus service in my neighborhood to something usuable. One of several reasons I gave up my car years ago is because I am a horrible driver. Just fucking awful. Be sure to waive at me when you see me on the road, Unbrainwashed! I'll be the one driving 29 in a 35 with my blinker on for the last six blocks. But at least my hand won't be "in your wallet", fuckwit.
23
@22- "un-usable". Oops.
24
@22 - Doesn't sound like you'll stand in the least.
Seattle driving joke! Whammy!
25
I used to work with a woman who was convinced that traffic jams were caused by buses being too big and taking up all the room on the road that cars could be occupying. I tried to explain to her that if the buses stopped running, that wouldn't mean that the people riding the buses would just stay home. They would drive their cars, too, and really jam up things. She was not convinced and I eventually gave up trying.
26
Every city ever has subsidized mass transit in order for the car drivers to live so far away from what they call their work. The reason it is subsidized is because it is good for the economy, it is good for the general mood and it provides an affordable alternative for your fellow citizens and neighbors you so hate. Subsidizing Metro has zero effect on these "conservative" champions of being assholes. They just reap the benefits from what was once thought of as commonsense and still is -- travelling from point A to point B within a city. They don't get it because they all live lives of being entitled middlemen and profiting off of their mark-ups. Imagine the amount of pocket change you would have if we upgraded and enhanced public transit and you got with the program.

I never drove too far back when I drove, but I estimate that I save around $600 a month easily by walking or bussing it. Time, they say, is money. Yes, it does take more time. And that indeed is, money. It is money we all spend on modest taxes that pay for public transit.

I'll never get why "conservatives" do not get this easy to understand tradeoff.
27
@25
"Conservative"=stupid

Note, I always put "conservative" in quotes. Reason why is because I know sensible people who think and refer to themselves as conservative. It's the lunatics, the haters and deeply myopic having no reference within history or reality that I just say are stupid. Because, they are. There is precisely no reason for a metro area to underfund its public transit options.
28
as someone currently trapped in Boston by this, I have to say, this is the right kind of Karma for train haters...
29
@25: I would have just told her it wasn't the buses, it was the semis. ;)

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