Can I just rant for a minute?
Oh yeah -- this is my site. I can do whatever the sam hill I want.
Seattle claims to want to reduce car usage -- or at least single occupancy vehicles. Now I can't offer a rundown as to who is standing in as "Seattle" in this case -- I imagine it's a combination of law makers, developers, politicians and voters. I can include myself in that lump. In fact, I'd like to totally eliminate single occupancy vehicles -- at least the ones with four wheels. I think we should close off Broadway and Denny to cars and make it a pedestrian free-for-all, like Downtown Crossing in Boston. But I'd settle for a handful of improvements to the existing structures.
It snowed last night. Capitol Hill got roughly an inch or two, but it was mixed with rain. Then the temperature plummeted, leaving the whole area a penguin's dream-come-true. Were I able to flop on my belly and slide to work, my commute would have been fast and fun.
Instead, I waited over an hour for a bus that is supposed to run every 10 minutes. The last straw came when three (THREE) #49 buses went by in the opposite direction, in a row. Not even a car in between them. I watched all three stop at each bus stop. Then, at the sixty minute mark, a #49 finally came, but it was too full to allow any of the 20 people waiting onto the bus. I was so pissed I decided to walk.
Not a single stretch of sidewalk from Broadway to Fairview was shovelled, sanded or even salted. Sometimes I had to step out into the street, which was less precarious, but was met with an angry blaring of car horns. Then there's the areas totally without sidewalks. The stairs through Colonnade Park end abruptly in a cul-de-sac with nowhere to walk except the middle of the street -- unless there's ice all over it, of course. So I climbed down the hill through blankets of ivy, which provided both traction and a landing strip, should the traction prove inadequate. The sidewalks are closed off all over South Lake Union due to Kondo Konstruction® -- so you need to leapfrog back and forth across four lane roads just to get anywhere. I made it to work fine, but pissed off as all get-out.
It infuriates me that there's no direct route by bus or foot down from Capitol Hill, which is one of the most populated areas in the city. The Powers that Be claim to want to encourage the use of "alternative transportation", but the list of punishments for doing so is dizzying. FlexCar auto sharing is now is taxed twice the amount one would pay if buying a car. And scooters... the roads are damn near un-ridable in some spots, with knee deep pot-holes and tons of slick metal plates everywhere. Instant heart attack? Just add water. Few of the traffic lights operating on a sensor register a scooter, so we are left to run red lights and pray for the best.
There is little designated motorcycle parking, and when I do find it, there is often a car parked in it. Parking between cars at a meter will get you either ticketed or crunched. Scooters, which take up one-sixth the amount of space of a sedan, have to pay the same dollar amount to park on the street where there are no meters.
Then we get some moron journalist publishing an article about how it's "technically legal" to move a scooter if you want the parking space. So after paying for your parking space, someone comes along and puts your bike on the sidewalk, where you are ticketed for being illegally stationed. That's if the parking thieves are nice -- more than once I've had my scooter simply thrown into a median or knocked over into the bushes so someone could take my spot.
And our abysmal public transportation system falls short of enticing people to step out of their cars. I say this even though any public transport I wish to take (bus, ferry, SLUT) is paid in full by my employer. I was given an annual Metro Combo pass, and even for free I hate taking the bus. They never run on schedule, they take forever to get anywhere, you have to transfer at least once to get across town, they're often full during peak hours so you can't get on. And the routes don't make sense -- they all run parallel so you have to take a bus into downtown and then back out again. It takes me 25 minutes to walk to work, and 50 minutes to take the bus.
We talk and talk about how single occupancy cars are bad, yet we close the one sensible pedestrian path from the Hill to downtown to make room for automobiles. There's an essay on History Link about the removal of the central Hill Climb. My favorite quote: “Pedestrians, who are a constant hazard to city driving, are entirely removed.”
That's one way to put it.
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