It took forever, but it’s finally here; finally this part of Seattle and the old multimodal dream is coming together nicely…
The remodeling project was so slow that at one point (three years ago), I decided it was best to just demolish the whole damn thing. My thinking? Making something new might make us more excited.
At 12:50 p.m. today, the defeated mayor of Seattle climbed up to the 11th floor of the clock tower at King Street Station (a structure that should have been demolished instead of endlessly being renovated) and officially restarted the station’s long-dead clock. These are the words he offered for the sad occasion, sad because at the very moment life was returning to the clock was also the moment that life was leaving his mayorship: “For the first time in more than a decade, Seattleites can once again set their watches by the King Street Station clock.” (Yes, Nickels, we will now be able to see if the Global Positioning Systems’s time synchronization for cellular phone networks is correct or not.) As the mayor descended the tower, step by step, the sound of time’s ticking diminished.
Now we have to deal with the old tracks. We want our bullet trains between the big cities. This want needs new tracks. Obama talked about doing something about it years ago. But because Obama is only good at being the first black president and not much else, we continue to only hear talk about this upgrade. (To be fair, there has been some serious talk about high-speed rail in our region since 1992. Obama is only continuing this solid tradition of talking.)
