it’s taken a few decades but seattle finally has really good light rail. every 10 minutes. you can get from the airport to the other side of the city for $4. it’s not perfect, and doesn’t go everywhere, but holy hell is it a giant upgrade for living in town.
Mmmmm. Grew up in Seattle, and finally having light rail is, of course, better than not having it.
But I’ve also lived in San Francisco, and I’m often frustrated by the unreliability and mismanagement of Seattle’s system. Meltdown days seem about as common as non-meltdown days.
fo sho if you’re going to compare it to bart, which is like, 50 years of concerted civil engineering to the last two decades here in Seattle, it’s gonna fall short. Bart’s an impressive outlier in commitment to the problem.
BART was pretty impressive too, but I was mostly thinking of San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni). It’s about 110 years old, and ran eight routes, cable car and light rail, when I lived there in the '00s (they’ve added a few routes since then). I didn’t have a car, and Muni took me everywhere inside the city, pretty reliably. Sure, you could count on a meltdown of the system every month or two, but Sound Transit is only 15 years old, too young to be as rickety and unreliable as it is. And it still flabbergasts me that no heads rolled over the bridge fiasco for the 2-line.
Not trying to be argumentative. Big fan of public transit. I live in Seattle and don’t own a car. Sound Transit needs to be better, is all.
it’s taken a few decades but seattle finally has really good light rail. every 10 minutes. you can get from the airport to the other side of the city for $4. it’s not perfect, and doesn’t go everywhere, but holy hell is it a giant upgrade for living in town.
Mmmmm. Grew up in Seattle, and finally having light rail is, of course, better than not having it.
But I’ve also lived in San Francisco, and I’m often frustrated by the unreliability and mismanagement of Seattle’s system. Meltdown days seem about as common as non-meltdown days.
fo sho if you’re going to compare it to bart, which is like, 50 years of concerted civil engineering to the last two decades here in Seattle, it’s gonna fall short. Bart’s an impressive outlier in commitment to the problem.
BART was pretty impressive too, but I was mostly thinking of San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni). It’s about 110 years old, and ran eight routes, cable car and light rail, when I lived there in the '00s (they’ve added a few routes since then). I didn’t have a car, and Muni took me everywhere inside the city, pretty reliably. Sure, you could count on a meltdown of the system every month or two, but Sound Transit is only 15 years old, too young to be as rickety and unreliable as it is. And it still flabbergasts me that no heads rolled over the bridge fiasco for the 2-line.
Not trying to be argumentative. Big fan of public transit. I live in Seattle and don’t own a car. Sound Transit needs to be better, is all.
muni is hella awesome too, it’s a great example of how not kneecapping things in the early 1900s changes the equation.
I wish ST was better, but I have limited expectations moving here from a red state.