Slashdot Mirror
Seattle Axes Monorail Project
Sokie writes "This afternoon the Seattle City Council passed a resolution advocating the terminiation of the Seattle Monorail Project. This follows a recent recommendation by the mayor that the project be scrapped. Lacking city support, the project looks to be dead and the city council will request that the state legislature formally terminate the project during their next session. City councilman Richard Conlin noted that the $1 million per week tax collection required by the SMP would be enough to eliminate fares on the city's bus network."
I moved to Seattle a year ago from California. I was positively impressed by the bus transit system free in the downtown area. There is this tunnel thing that let me go from home to work in 5 minutes cutting all the touristic area and traffic. Neat. There is also this street car you can take from Pier 71 to the international district that goes by the waterfront. If you live on that path, it's like being a tourist everytime you commute to work. Swell. Now comes Fall 2005. They just shut down the tunnel to be retrofitted for 2 YEARS! WTF! Are they hiring part timers to do the job and working French hours on that project? I reregistered my car and payed a premium of +$430 for the monorail (3% of the deprecated value of the vehicule). Ouch! This tax was explained to me to be started to pay for the monorail project. My first reaction was : the rail must be made of platinum for that price. Then I became aware fo the monorail project and the big scam. 14 miles of line for $11B. A line that goes from two places that don't really require this common transportation (North-South). While the east bay and cheaper housing in the SE (Renton area) still has a huge problem at rush hour. So now they cancelled the monorail and they are keeping the tax to pay for free downtown bus access which is reduced to minimum thanks the the lightrail retrofit. The Seattle Art museum is building an extension near to the Street car depot and almost killed the Street car. So much for a museum that goes and remove folkore from the city. Thanks god lots of supporters of the street car gave donations to save it. But this is going to be shutdown until the museum is done building their sculture crap art park and they found out what to do with the depot. Probably a year or two. On top of this, add up that the monorail is stopping short of 900 yards from the airport. So you will need to lug your suitcases in a shuttle for that distance. WTF. Seattle had 2 architects who designed the city one for the north side, the other for the south. There is a building downtown that shows the disconnection between the two dudes. The building is at the corner of 5th and Stewart and it has a triangular facade. It looks to me coming from Europe that the whole USA have a triangular facade when it comes to common transportation.