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Comments
Ask any parent with kids who play soccer, swim team etc, go to schools in a different neighborhood. The driving can be endless.
Just soccer alone. Tons of single adults play rec soccer and the field assignments are scattered across an enormous area.
If we had built real transit in the 70s , things might be different. But we didn't. Who built our train system? Atlanta.
This will likely continue, unless so called urbanists wake up, and realize that where you put a subway is just as important as building it in the first place. Don't send half empty trains out to distant, sprawling suburbs (or even relatively close ones). Build urban lines, with good bus integration. Vancouver (our closest neighboring big city) is a great example of how to build a relatively small, cheap system that manages to do wonders for transit mobility. Even in the suburbs, where folks probably do own cars, they don't use them nearly as often as we do. Vancouver has roughly three times the transit ridership per capita that we do, and most of that is on buses.
Who cares about car ownership stats. If you own a car and use transit when it works, then thank you! It isn't easy for most folks to relocate to a home near their work.
King County Metro ridership is 395,000 boardings per day and Sound Transit is over 150,000, plus Pierce County Transit, Washington State Ferries walk on boardings, Community Transit and Everett Transit. Believe it or not, we have one of the most heavily used bus systems in the country. Light rail usage will gain exponentially as the system grows, we have already witnessed this with the opening of the Capital Hill and UW stations.
It's easy to complain about transit when someone else is responsible for coordinating planning, funding, expansion. Our geography, protection of our environment, and strong community interests make it challenging. People complain because they are stuck in gridlock, yet most folks don't want to see (including me) more pavement for cars.
I agree, and it is better than average. It is bogged down by increasingly bad traffic, though, in the city (where transit matter most).
Light rail usage will gain exponentially as the system grows, we have already witnessed this with the opening of the Capitol Hill and UW stations.
That section is rare. There are very few corridors that hold as much potential for light rail as that piece. For Sound Transit, it is a once in a system development. A Metro 8 subway would be similar. Ballard to UW would also lead to a huge increase in transit mobility (but more because of bus integration). But neither are on the table, and it will be a very long time before we build either one (ST4? ST5?).
It is crazy to think that some of the pieces (e. g. Lynnwood to Northgate) will come even close to improving transit the way that U-Link has. It is pretty obvious when you look at a census map (like this one). The most densely populated areas are right within this section. You also have the biggest downtown as well as the biggest university (which has a sizeable and growing office sector). You really can't miss with this, even if you make plenty of mistakes.
They did, of course. They left out the First Hill station, and the bus integration is terrible. The result is that while it works great for areas close to the station, it does nothing for areas not that far away -- areas that are very populous by Seattle standards.
The system will improve, of course. Adding the station in the U-District will be huge, and extending to Northgate and the east side will be great. Meanwhile, Seattle itself is doing some very good work with what little money it has to improve the bus service.
But without spending money on the right projects, it is bound to level off. In many cases, you just can't "get there from here" when it comes to transit, even if ST3 is built and even for the areas it purports to serve.
Citation please (seriously -- I'm curious how you got that number). Typically they cover mode share for commuting, which often decreases automobile numbers. About 35% of the people in Boston take public transport to work, and about 45% take a private car (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_shar…).