When I read the above sentence in Charles' short post yesterday about the COMPLETE FUCKING JOKE that "Rapid Ride" has turned out to be—no one could've predicted that a bus with the word "rapid" painted on its side isn't going to cut through traffic any faster than a bus that doesn't have "rapid" painted on its side—I thought of this headline on the cover of Seattle Times a month or so ago. The headline made me so mad I took a picture of it:
Two things.
First, bus "rapid transit" is now, always has been, and always will be the "mass transit fix" most likely to be proposed and embraced by people who don't rely on mass transit to get anywhere. Bus rapid transit only works if lanes are taken away from cars and given to buses—dedicated bus lanes—and, since that's never going to happen, bus rapid transit will never work.
Second, gee... maybe Ballard commuters would've been better served if we had built—oh, I dunno—maybe an elevated system? Dedicated lanes in the sky? With trains that ran from, I don't know, Ballard to West Seattle?