"Why we did not have Link for so long will be the mystery for those in the future to figure out."

Well that's easy. You have to thank the backward thinking of our region in the late 60s early 70s who rejected the rapid transit piece of Forward Thrust in favor of more highways. Instead, all those federal dollars we could have received went instead towards building Atlanta's MARTA rail system.

@1 - Sad, but true. Now we have to, expensively, retrofit an already built city with light rail, instead of, cheaply, reserving the right-of-ways to do it properly in a timely manner.

All of this despite the glistening Monorail during the World's Fair. It's not like anyone didn't have any forewarning or anything...

That's fantastic that you have a 4 minute walk to the Columbia City station. For those of us in the south end with longer walks to the stations, the situation is not so ideal.

The commuters that, like me, that use Rainier Beach station, face a walk home through some of the least safe streets in the city, where shootings and other violent behavior sometimes seem like a daily occurrence (today's example -- http://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-p…). In my case, it's a 20 minute walk down Henderson before splitting off to a side street. This walk is necessitated by the lack of park-and-ride lots, zone limited parking nearby, and conviction that it's better to be a moving target than to wait for an unknown length of time at a bus stop for a connecting bus that would only put me a few minutes closer to home anyway.

Those riders using Othello station may or may not be long time enough residents to remember the vicious beating death of Filipino-American Danny Vega (http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/se…) next to the station, or the periodic cycles of attacks and robberies of transit users.

Don't get me wrong; I do love my neighborhood, my neighbors, and all of what the south end has to offer, and after 10 years of residing here, I have no interest in leaving anytime soon. But I can't help but feel a touch of envy to hear about 4 minute walks from a fully gentrified neighborhood I couldn't hope to afford, even 10 years ago, to buy in.

The lack of public safety and the city's "making the perfect the enemy of the good" approach to forcing bus connections to stations rather than providing similar park-and-ride facilities to the ones that tens of thousands of commuters use every day in the north end and east side, means that, for now, I use Link for commuting during daylight hours, and can't take advantage of it to take advantage of Seattle's night life. For some reason the city felt so strongly about preventing parking lots near the stations that they tried to entirely prohibit even private lots (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news…).

The new expansion of Link Light Rail to Capitol Hill and UW Stadium is a fantastic thing. I hope, though, that the media coverage this expansion is generating will shine a light on some of the glaring deficiencies of the older parts of the system in the south end of Seattle.

Anyone who blithely dismisses how "backwards" Seattle voters were in rejecting the Forward Thrust rapid transit has no idea of the times in which that initiative was put before the voters. Seattle was not a wealthy city, the population was nowhere near what it is now, and the employment base was very Boeing-centric. While the Boeing Bust hadn't yet happened, there were certainly rumblings.

It took Seattle until the mid to late 80's to recover from the Boeing bust. Ironically, the bust was part of what made Seattle such a magnet for young people - you could get a slacker job and a cheap apartment, and live very well on Rainier Beer and Mary Pang frozen dinners.

@3 - The entire 7th paragraph is about how financially inaccessible the link is. The last sentence is "We can thus expect a class divide to occur between the two forms of public transportation." Although the author only touched on one reason why, I'm certain they (and others) are aware of the others, which you've mentioned.

Charles, west seattle, queen anne and magnoila are all quicker then a five hour flight. From downtown you can bus to all in under an hour and walk under 2.

Really, what a silly silly thing to say...