"Couples display their flat and vapid feelings of love by holding hands, side-by-side, on the escalator"

Damn, you really - I mean REALLY - need to get laid...

The Northgate and Roosevelt stations open in 2021. Yes, the next decade. But is it a pity that it's not open before it's ready?

Capitol Hill station, where 6'3 dudes will elbow a chick out the way in the mad, silent (there will be no excuse mes or sorrys) stampede to the escalator when the door opens like the starting gates at Emerald Downs.

It's like all rules of society instantaneously cease to exist.

@2, two things i do not do: cry and hold hands.

People can get carried away with PDA, but holding hands? How could that possibly unnerve you?

So unless you not getting any, nobody should either?

@5 you are a sad, strangle little man and you have my pity.

*strange

Pls no violence

Charles, is your complaint with the Westlake Station itself, or with the kind of people whom one sees on public transit in the middle of the workday?

@6 the issue is they are side by side leaving no room for people to passon the left. If you aren't walking up an escalator urban etiquette is to stand on the right so people can walk past you on the left.

This type of stuff drives me nuts on the transit here. Seattle is turning in to a big city and no one knows how to act like they live in a city. Not moving to the back of the bus, crowding the doors so people can't get off on the light rail, and taking your back pack off on crowded buses are all things the folks here need to learn.

I'd love to read your experiences behind the wheel in a town newly filled with spaced-out Lyft drivers, Charles!

Good grief. Celebrate that a significant number of tourists are getting on light rail from the airport and riding it to their hotels in Westlake, rather than renting cars or taking taxis to get from SeaTac to downtown. Isn't that what you want?

@10:

And yet, significantly, Charles makes absolutely no mention of whether they are walking up - or down - the escalator or not, so one can only conclude (confirmed @5) that it's not their side-by-side presence on the escalator to which he objects, but rather their very mild PDA. So, why do you automatically assume a behavior which is neither mentioned nor apparently germane to his "criticism"?

Charles, despite the hoards of new riders and even maxing out how many the trains could take at peak hours, you forgot to mention the taxes that are subsidizing each ticket.

For the millionth time--escalators, despite what the late Mitch Hedberg would have you think--are not designed to be walked on...down or up. You endanger yourself and others by walking on escalators...and expecting 50% of the escalator's potential capacity to be left open for people behaving dangerously makes everyone slower.

If you want to walk, take the stairs.

@15 What universe do you live in? Rambling this sort of insanity, how have you not been shot by a cop already?

@10 I agree that it is frustrating, particularly if the place is dead, but a study in NYC found that leaving the left side open for people to "pass" does not hasten the flow of humans up the escalator. So maybe taking a chill pill is a better option. (I still agree that most people in SEA totally do not know how to behave in a city.)

Once again, rural-minded bumpkin Mudede is here to tell you city people how to behave yourselves.

Here's what a real urban-type person expects from the people in a city: lots of oblivious tourists, starry-eyed lovers in slow motion, unpredictable ill-behaved children, strutting youths, and on and on, all getting in everyone's way, from one end of town to the other. The realer the city, the more distracted, unpredictable, imaginary-code-violating people it will contain.

And the real city person does not even notice them.

Any real urban-type person long ago mastered the fine arts of sidestepping, sudden hopping, spin-dodging, moment-to-moment rerouting, all while maintaining an aloof, far-off gaze, serenely filtering out even the loudest unexpected sounds and gaudiest sideshow spectacles.

The person who can not do this, the person who instead is constantly bothered by it all, who must complain over and over again about the very things that the city is, does not want to live in a real city. This person wants to live in a pretend city found in some book of useless philosophical pronouncements. This person wants nothing to do with what real cities are made of.

What this person wants to live in, really, is a boarding school, not a city.

@13, i simply and have always admired the quiet lovers. those who feel it so deep that there is no need for these cheap and plebeian forms of display.

@10:

Here's the NYT article that highlights the study to which @17 refers. Of particular note is the statement from the representative from Otis that they advise against walking on their escalators, for reasons of safety.

@19:

"Cheap and plebeian", how very unproletarian of you. Why, hand holding is probably one of the most common means of displaying affection throughout human civilization; one could say it's almost ubiquitous, and crosses over ethnic, cultural, social, linguistic, class, gender, even political boundaries. It's an indicator of rapport, respect, concern, and trust, above and beyond even romantic feelings.

You should try it sometime - it would probably do you a world of good.

@19

That silent, private love is the love of the bourgeois, the love of the rich and the comfortable.

But the love of people who have nothing, nothing for themselves, nothing to give but their love, nothing to show the world except their moments of love... well, the bourgeois loathes and resents this very different kind of lover, naturally.

Because this sort of lover is so showily showing the bourgeois that social standing and wealth and ever-so-proper comportment are utterly useless things to a person who has love, love which costs nothing, love which even the lowest plebian proletarian peasant can find, love which can never be packaged up and warehoused and hoarded and kept away from the awful little people who do all these awful little things in the awful, horrible city.

If it is a Seattle thing to stand on the right side of the escalator, and walk up the left side, then THAT'S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO!
If you can't appreciate that we have always done things our own special way here in Seattle, than perhaps you haven't lived here long???
We are the people that invented the wave for fucks sake!!!
Deal with it!

"luggage is accorded the same status as a person or a lover"
what is charles mudede, who wrote that sentence, yearning to tell, having seperated 'person' from 'lover' as categories?
1. he's into -and i mean realllllly înto (catch my "winky" wink drift) - dolls. 2. he elevates (denegrates?) "the lover" as a being set apart from personhood, as for instance one might with a saint through devotional actions and whatnot. 3. #1 & #2 combo.

Don't pretend Mudede is some complex dude.

He is basically just a middle schooler trying to be edgy. His writing makes a lot more sense when you look at it this way.

I mean, ever wonder why other writers use The Stranger as a farm team before going of somewhere better, yet Mudede just sits still for years writing the same four posts over and over?

there are a lot of things wrong with Westlake Station, and yet you managed to hit none of them.

good job Charles. good job.

Able-bodied adults should not be holding hands in crowded public spaces. This is more common sense than common courtesy, but it is still rude. In cities you must always be aware of how you are taking up space, and two people holding hands take up more space than 2 people walking alone.

San Francisco is light years worse than Seattle. Riding BART is where every stereotype about SF is true.

came back for a visit after some time in more urban regions and i'm mostly confused at how silent the capitol hill station is at rush hour. no one was talking anywhere. all you could hear was the shuffle of footsteps. i'm used to buying carrot cake on septa and at least overhearing something to bitch about later on the mta. the sterile sound of the link station is disconcerting.

Mudede is usually spot on but this is an odd post.

9m boardings this year in Seattle? How about a city with 5.7m average boardings each DAY (weekdays), and even with that 100x busier network, mid-day PDAs underground and on the stairs are in my humble opinion cute.

Buddhists talk about vicarious joy. Try it!

Rejoice being in a place where couples of any gender identity can and do express simple affection in public.

And the escalator "stand to one side" myth: London transit proved it, when busy, more people flow per minute if everyone stands and no one keeps to one side. (Ahh, for escalators in the subway. How lucky some are. Why is it NYC subway looks like it's stuck in the 1920s? Oh, right, other cities had escalators in the 1920s too.)

Now, studies aside, if anyone is blocking my way and I'm in a rush -- gettaouttahere!