gavinshearer.com

So, this has nothing to do with the Storm, but I wanted to ask anyway.

What's with the Seattle Times' hatchet job on the streetcar?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004433488_streetcar23m.html

I have to say, the Seattle Times article didn't seem so bad to me. The core facts are pretty specific - ridership is where it's projected to be, early bugs in the Streetcar with payment and reliability are being ironed out, etc. What makes you think it's a hatchet job?

The headline, for one: "City says streetcar is on track even if trains look empty"

Plus you have quotes like "I think it does a lot of damage to the overall image of mass transit, when you have a lot of unused capacity going back and forth." etc. It comes across to me that the article is intended to reinforce negative perceptions, not answer them.

By the way, I sure wish Bloomington had something like the streetcar. I'm lucky in that I have a sub-fifteen minute walk to the university campus where I work, and that I'm pretty much able to get away with driving 40 miles or less per week, but I'd love to get that even closer to zero. Unfortunately, my place of worship (6 miles away, and since I'm part of the staff I take 3 or 4 trips there a week, typically)is in an unincorporated part of the county where city buses do not go, so there's only so much I can do on that front.

Nonetheless, the other night I had to take some books back to the library and run to the co-op, and I decided to try taking the bus, just to see how it worked. To give you a sense of what I'm used to, the library is about a five minute drive from home; the co-op seven or minutes. Round-trip would take me about half an hour, tops, including actually going in to conduct my business.

So, here's the breakdown of how it went:

Walk to bus stop -- 10 minutes
Wait for bus -- 5 minutes
Bus stop to library -- 10 minutes

At this point I'll note that the trip to the library could be walked in twenty minutes, so I've already lost time by taking the bus.

Wait for next bus after conducting business at library -- 20 minutes
Bus top to drop-off point closest to co-op -- 8 minutes
Walk from drop-off to co-op 8 minutes

So, an hour just to get out there. For comparison purposes, I walked home from the co-op; that was a half hour.

Upon checking the online schedule to see what my best bet would have been had I only been going to the co-op, I found that even that would have still taken 40 minutes (again, compare to the half hour walk).

Now, the other side of this is the price to me, the end user: $0.00. A valid university ID gets me on for free. So, it simply becomes a question of what my time is worth.

The problem appears to be that the main purpose of Bloomington Transit appears to be to get people further out within city limits to the university campus. I already live close enough to the university campus that it actually makes the bus the least time-efficient means available -- even moreso than walking. I'm told that if you live a ten- or more minute drive away from campus, it then starts to become more efficient -- so I am left with the irony that I'd need to live farther away from the university in order to drive less! This is made even more ironic by Bloomington Transit's current "Dump the Pump" campaign. I'd like to, believe me!

The London Underground it ain't, to say the least. Now, I suppose that as gas prices (and, consequently, ridership) go up, they'll need to improve routes and services, but it still remains a head-scratching conundrum when one wishes to do as much of the right thing as one can, and finds that it's just not quite that simple.

Richard

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