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Seattle Monorail & California High Speed Rail Move Forward
bscottid writes "Woo-hoo! The monorail passed in Seattle!. And, it was driven by an amazing grass-roots effort of people who saw a way to use technology to get us moving again here in The Emerald City. Everyone mark your calendars, because in 2007 you're invited up here to take a quick, scenic ride around the beautiful city of Seattle! (Begin Simpsons references now)" It's also worth pointing out that in the recent california election, a pair of bills were passed which put aside approximately $10b for the construction of California's high speed rail project.
I'm not sure if this new plan extends into Oregon,
Oregon isn't in the recommended routes yet.
But, if we get something going from LA -> Sacramento, I'm hoping that it will present enough of an incentive to go to the larger Oregonian cities on the way to Seattle.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The current Seattle monorail system is profitable.
Of course it costs a dollar or so and takes you a distance you can comfortably walk (basically from the Space Needle to Nordstrom's headquarters, a distance of maybe a half mile), and is a tourist attraction to boot. We locals occasionally refer to it as the "Train To Nowhere" (after a cabaret skit in which it was featured). (To be fair, they have a deal where you can park at the Seattle Center parking center and commute into downtown on the monorail, thereby avoiding downtown traffic. I'm sure it makes a fair amount of money this way.)
Whether anyone uses it will depend on whether it ends up going where people want to go at an attractive price.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I live in West Seattle, and my first reaction to this story was to respond like you did. But I didn't have to because you put the facts so well. Way to go. So let me paint a more subjective picture.
In the 14 years I've lived in West Seattle the traffic has at least tripled. Not just commute traffic -- people do a lot more in their lives than just go to and from work. I'm talking about shopping, going out to eat, etc. within the immediate area. The monorail isn't going to do squat for that. In fact, it will probably bring in more people and make the situation worse. As much as I hate the traffic on the West Seattle bridge, at least it probably discourages some people from moving over here.
This is an area people don't tend to move out of. It has a large number of people who have lived here since WWII and before, have raised their families here and have mostly taken good care of their homes. Those folks are dying off now, and their houses are being bought by people who either subdivide the lots with two skinny townhouse-like structures or put up 4-story apartments and business buildings, depending on whether there is a view. Property prices (and taxes) have therefore soared in the last 10 years. Our house value has quadrupled, which I suppose would be fine if we were real estate speculators, but we just want to live here. A district of longtime homeowners is turning into a district of renters, which we all know will eventually drive the quality of the area down.
The City of Seattle bureaucrats see this as "revitalizing" the area. I see it as "devitalizing". What they get is more tax money, from the residents but more importantly from the businesses, which pay both property tax and business tax. What we residents get is more crime, more graffiti (not the cool artsy kind, the dumbass tag kind), more losers walking around with an attitude, and more cars driven by hurried, over-extended people talking on cellphones, drinking lattes and putting on makeup.
A little rant about Seattle politics...
Schlach mentioned above that the monorail passed by only 800 votes. Seattle is developing a history of big projects that pass by a narrow margin. The new monorail is the most recent. Seahawks Stadium was another one, but at least it too actually passed. The Mariners baseball stadium was defeated by us mere voters, but the state legislature responded by obligingly writing a law authorizing any county with a million or more residents to issue bonds to build athletic complexes. There's only one such county in the state, guess which one. To avoid future complications they even gave the law a 2-year expiration date. The stadium the county commissioners authorized cost 3 times as much as the one the voters rejected.
Makes me proud to live in a democracy.