Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses.
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
In comparison: my commuter train in Germany comes every 30 minutes (even a bit more often at peak), but travels at 160km/h. Door-to-door, it's about 20% quicker than driving, with no parking stress, no unpredictable highway conditions and I can even get some work done on the WiFi.
Sure, there are issues with those trains sometimes, but it is really an easy decision.
I also experienced the same thing when traveling in Europe. When you're on the line and traveling from one stop to another, it's fast and easy. However, we discovered that most of the things we wanted to visit were nowhere near the transit line for medium distances; it was faster to take a bike and, for long distances, to drive.
Public transit people don't value their time? I wonder about the people stuck on I-76 as I pass over them on the regional rail here in Philly. Sure I deal with a late train now and then. But those people deal with center city traffic every day twice a day.
If the transit is faster that driving for you, then pretty sure you in the minority.
You have to get all the conditions just right for this to be the case
- You have to live next to the train (or next to a frequent bus which takes you to the train)
- You have to have a train going to the approximate right direction
- You have to work in place next to the train (or next to a frequent bus)
- Your work place is OK with you coming in late every once in a while, and your home life is OK with you coming back late every once in a while.
As long as you have a high-demand profession, plenty of potential workplaces and you are not on the fixed schedule, you can be picky and and choose next to transit - but many people don't.
Same goes with place to live - in my region you choose 2 of (inexpensive, next to transit, good public schools). If you have no kids, trains maybe faster for you, but if you want good public school your public transit commute turns super long.
> Some cities do have bus-only lanes, and others have full on subway systems which is great but most do not.
So, er, maybe a first step is installing more bus lanes? They really can make a tremendous difference, and they can transport far more people in a given amount of space than cars can. For instance, look at the picture on this article: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/dublin/dublin-news/priv...
That’s transport for 360 people in the four visible buses, plus 400 in the tram. And, er, four in the taxi, I suppose.
Yeah this is true in my city, Phoenix. We don’t have commuter rail just commuter buses. They take the car pool lane but so does every Tesla so that isn’t as big of an advantage as it sounds. We have light rail but it is a specific route in surface streets and much slower than driving on the freeway.
Yeah in dense urban areas in the US we have transit. Maybe it could be better but we have it. Other places are too spread out. There are not enough people going to the same places at the same times for a really useful transit system to exist.
E-bikes are great in Seattle until they are stolen. Bike theft is the one single issue that is driving down bike ridership in the city, since police and the city government don't really care about it.
This may surprise you, but not every ebike is guaranteed to be stolen. Get a heavy chain or angle-grinder-resistant U-lock, don't leave it out overnight, and you'll greatly reduce probability of theft.
The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail.
Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.
Cops here in Chicago will not do anything about bike thefts. Multiple cases of vigilantes getting arrested after they took the law into their own hands when cops wouldnt retrieve their airtagged bike.
Vancouver, BC's airport Skytrain does this really well, Amsterdam is ok too. Having a train straight to/from international/domestic long distance travel is such a huge deal. I wish Van and Seattle had a fast and more accommodating rail link; as it stands I have to rent a car to get down there for a long winters show. Not really have to I guess, but otherwise I'd have to spend the night in a hotel or hostel. Your new elevated strain that extends 40 miles into the northern suburbs (if I have that right) is pretty wild though. We're lacking om that front for now.
And then them making to along I-90 instead of 520 also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'd LOVE a fast line from the east side to U-district. But I don't understand the logic behind the current scheme.
It's for a few reasons, let's see if I remember them all from the run-up to the Sound Transit 2 vote in 2008:
Mercer Island exists and has political clout (even though they tried to use that clout to force Sound Transit to not use the express lanes on I-90) and would demand a station no matter what.
Running across a floating bridge is hard enough and the Governor Albert Rosellini Bridge (SR 520 Floating Bridge to the Yanks) is the longest in the world. Going across the dual-named bridge that carries I-90 would be shorter and was seen as easier back then.
You don't have to turn around to serve Bellevue and then Redmond. Coming up from I-90 you hit the big part of Bellevue then you turn right and keep going northeast to Redmond. Coming from SR 520 you'd go south into Bellevue then have to U-turn to go back to meet BelRed and Overlake.
At the time, we didn't know when, if ever, the SR 520 bridge would be replaced. The previous span was a nightmare. It had a movable bit in the middle, the road deck sat at roughly water level, and would routinely sway so hard in strong winds that the bridge would have to be blocked off so the midspan section could be opened to relieve stress and prevent the thing from sinking. The I-90 bridges have no such issue (considering the damn thing had already sunk once in the 90s). There was no way to use the previous SR 520 bridge for light rail, though the new one is built to support it.
You also catch a lot more potential riders in station areas around I-90 and South Bellevue. The Points cities are basically HOAs with delusions of grandeur. There's no hope they'll gain more people in any of our lifetimes, meanwhile the areas the 2 Line passes through are already fairly populated by Eastside standards and have room to grow (also by Eastside standards).
Meanwhile, the 542 and 545 are comparatively very fast.
Wow I didn’t know the old bridge was such a nightmare. This also makes me wonder why this line only opened now, if it was voted on all the way back in 2008.
I do usually take the 542 now, and it works well-enough, but it only comes every 30 minutes which is annoying.
ST put priority to going north through Cap hill and up to Northgate (where there used to be a mall). Prepping the I90 bridge took a long time (8 years ago they shut down the express lanes, after adding an HOV to the main bridge) so far from my recall.
It was scheduled to open a few months ago but early this year they found a fault with the rail supports on the bridge that was missed as they were put in during early COVID and didn't have the ability to get them inspected as well as normal. So for the next year you've got Redmond to Bellevue with a missing link across the lake.
On the other side. I think that this month the main line from Northgate to Lynhood is going to open with several more stops so the system is expanding in a couple directions.
I completely agree that the 542 needs more frequency. Sound Transit likely saw the dip from Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing work-from-home and figured they could reuse the service hours. Remember that Metro has been suffering from a bad shortage of workers (drivers, maintenance, and operations) that they've only just started to recover from. This is important because Sound Transit contracts out operation of most of its transit service to the local agencies so Metro operates the 542, 545, 550, and others.
Hopefully now that Metro hiring and training is on the upswing Sound Transit will be able to get more bus service hours.
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.