What I Learned in the First Month of the Lynwood Link Extention

On August 30, Sound Transit added, between Northgate and Lynnwood, 8.5 miles and four (soon to be five) stations to its 1 Line. This amounts to 33 track miles. The time it takes to move from one end of the present line to the other is just over an hour. This is the real deal. A big section of the region has been liberated from I-5, and time spent searching for parking.

Two weeks after the extension opened, however, it was hit by electrical issues. An army of self-bloated commenters wasted no time denouncing light rail on news posts that covered the incident. This one in the Seattle Times was typical: “That section of rail is only 2 weeks old, at huge cost of billions of dollars. You would think that something so new and supposedly built to be in service for decades would not have a failure like this. What the heck throw another million a minute to this total waste of money.”

The gold believed to be in this reasoning is transformed into worthless straw by the daily existence of traffic jams. 

Yes, the Link had service disruptions on that day, September 17, but how is that any different than the constant car clogs on I-5? Both are system failures, but one, I-5 and its connection of roads, occurs on a scale that dwarfs and wastes far more money than the other. Not much thinking is required to appreciate the truth of this assertion. Being in a traffic jam only means that the freeway or street is not working. It’s broken. And it breaks almost every day of the week.  

The power of car ideology in our society is such that many drivers cannot even see a traffic jam for what it actually is. Sitting for hours in a car is certainly much worse than waiting for a delayed train. One commentator on Seattle Times‘s post “Link train service restored after electrical issue had caused delays” wrote, “With all of the issues on ST choo choo trains and associated infrastructure, it seems reasonable to require ‘Ride at Your Own Risk’ signs throughout their facilities.” Such a sign would make more sense if it were posted on an I-5 on-ramp for several glaring reasons: Frequent eruptions of road rage, car accidents that are often deadly, and the considerable mental wear-and-tear caused by the time-oppression of long jams.

Car ideology (and an ideology only works its wonders when it doesn’t recognize itself as an ideology) unexpectedly came out in the open during an Amtrak bus trip I recently took between Vancouver, BC and Seattle. The bus driver, who evidently saw himself as something of a personality, blamed the traffic jam that reduced our exit from Vancouver to a snail’s pace on the city’s lack of freeways. “Yeah, folks, we got the ‘60s to thank for this,” he snarkily said on the bus’s PA system. “This is why were in this mess. We never built freeways.” But a few hours later, the very same driver had nothing to say about the traffic jam we hit not long after passing Everett. Movement was so slow on the I-5 that it took nearly two hours to reach the University District. The jam was worse than anything we experienced in freeway-less Vancouver, BC. As we crawled along, I saw a Link train that had left Mountlake Terrace Station fly toward Shoreline North/185th Station on an elevated track.

Been thinking lately about how entitled pedestrians and cyclists are, and how we can’t find any money for public transit.

(FHWA 2025 budget is $70B.) pic.twitter.com/38y5g8zDCh

— Tait Sougstad (@TSougstad) October 2, 2024

Not long after the expansion to Lynnwood opened, a lot of noise was made about the exploding cost of the proposed Link expansion to West Seattle. KING 5: “Estimated cost of West Seattle light rail extension increases by $2 billion.” But of course, this concern goes up in smoke when it’s exposed to the light of reasoning that’s free of an ideology that’s daily, hourly compounded by ads that never show traffic jams but fantastic automobiles racing up hills or crossing some remote nowhere. There is simply no way that the price tag attached to the construction and maintenance of roads and the storage of cars in the form of massively subsidized parking can be compared to those related to public transportation.

And here we reach the highest point of reasoning on this transportation matter. We can only conclude that those who complain about the rising costs of Link’s expansion are in that sorry state Ajax found himself in when he thought, while in a battle, he was slaying the enemy but, in fact, was just butchering sheep. They are in a state comparable to madness. Driving a car provides nothing in the way of what economists, following the ideas of Arthur Cecil Pigou, call a social good. Zero. In fact, it makes society worse: pollution, deadly accidents, and debts that most incomes struggle to clear. But using the train or bus does provide a genuine public service, a social good, which is why Link and Metro should be free. It can even be said, in the most rational sense, that drivers should pay people to use public transportation.

The present carbon tax, which may become history in November, is nowhere near enough. We need a tax that is not transferred to the public purse but directly to those who use Link and other forms of transportation that do not burn fossil fuels. If this happened, if drivers were forced to pay all of the social costs of car ownership, then we would live in the kingdom of reason. Just think about it. Really put your mind to it, and you will see that a person driving a car has a far greater negative impact on society than a homeless person in a tent. This fact is just there. Another fact is you can reach, for close to nothing, the delights and surprises of the suburbs by Link. 

Thank GOD for the Lynnwood light rail https://t.co/rcDAVzY67G

— Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) October 2, 2024