Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

In my last post, I said I’d post about my monorail conversation and questions. So here goes:

Let me digress for a second with my disclaimers — I’m torn on the monorail. As a “member of the Seattle community” now, I absolutely want to see the transit problems get solved. I think monorails are a cool and (relatively) inexpensive transit solution. I have been following the monorail news pretty closely online and in some email mailing lists since I moved to Seattle. In reading up on all this, I even think I understand a little bit of the history around the Sound Transit light rail project, and the OnTrack group in terms of how they perceive the monorail project (and reciprocally, how the monorail project perceives them).

 

And now that I’ve been living in the Central Area for a few months and trying to ride public transit quite regularly, I have some perspectives on the state of transit in this area as well.

 

So, let’s combine these two… and that leads me back to my point about the monorail project table at the Central Area Community Festival.

 

I started to talk with the person handing the booth, expressing my curiousity about why they would be spending their time in the Central Area. My not-so-subtle point (which I actually had to spell out explicity to get across) is that, with the limited exception of Metro bus, all of the current transit projects go to great lengths to route around the central area rather than through it!

 

I asked this poor fellow essentially “why should I support the monorail?”. I recognize it’s not all about me or my neighborhood, and in that regard I probably do support the monorail. I’d hate to have to drive in from West Seattle!

 

But, here’s where I was surprised. The fellow had absolutely nothing. He conjectured that we have lousy transit in Central Area because it doesn’t have enough population density. I figured this might be true, and I certainly didn’t have any facts to refute it.

 

Today, I figured I’d poke around a little bit on the Internet and see if this is a valid reason. I found some population density info from the census.gov site (here’s the link to the direct query). This is from the 2000 census, and maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it shows the part of the Central district that is being bypassed by all the new transit solutions as just about the same population density as the heavily-served downtown area! Here’s the image and legend from the above link:

 

 

So in the picture above, split the dark green color in half, left and right. The section on the left (let’s say west of 12th Avenue) gets a ton of new transit work done in the various plans. The right half? Uh, pretty much nothing. “Just take the 48 bus, nevermind the route is so long that it’s almost always inconsistent and late”, I can just imagine them saying…

 

Let’s break it down: According to this Sound Transit Fact Sheet, Link Light rail will run this path:

 

 

Just look at that path! It completely bypasses the core of Central Area, adding just a small stop back at the proposed First Hill station as part of the North Link extension. Of course, even that might not happen if the First Hill station is cut, as it sounds like it might be.

 

Okay, to be fair to the monorail-table guy, this isn’t really about monorail at all. The green line was always going from West Seattle to Ballard, and nowhere near Central Area.

 

And also, maybe he didn’t have “absolutely nothing”. He said that it makes more sense to route through the downtown. For the monorail green-line, that’s obviously true. And the part of the Central Area that gets bypassed by the others is roughly paralell to the downtown segments of all of the transit I’ve been calling out. Fair enough. But it still sucks, and I hope eventually some mass (and more importantly, RAPID) transit makes its way into the Central Area! You can see how bad it really is in the last picture, below — everything goes right around us!

 

But I’m still curious why they’d send someone to represent the monorail project to the Central Area Community Festival who had no answers for why I (as a Central Area resident), should support the monorail project’s continued existence?! I’ll throw out an easy suggestion: lie and say that we’ll eventually get the rest of the 2nd-phase citywide monorail (and in particular, the “gold corridor”) implemented. Then, it’d be easier to stomach the cost of a monorail I’d likely never have the need to use. The gold line would make me very happy, as it solves the bulk of the transit problems I have today — getting downtown easily, getting straight-north to the U district easily, even getting to the east-side easily would be helped by the gold line! I like the gold line route possibilities: