I Rode The SLUT
I was working downtown yesterday, and needed to head a bit north to the South Lake Union area in order to rescue a client in distress. (Distress that I may have caused, but let’s not go there.) The South Lake Union area, already home to medical complexes such as the Fred Hutchinson Center and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, is being built out into a mini-city almost single-handedly by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Corporation.
The city has done a number of things to accommodate the development, among them installing the South Lake Union Trolley, aka SLUT. I’d seen the trolley quite a few times, but yesterday was the first time I was actually going the same direction that it was, so I hopped on it (Click to enlarge):
In my view, mass transit that operates at street grade (as does the SLUT) is never going to reach the potential that transit in its own grade can provide. Street-grade transit has to stop for stop lights, gets caught in the same traffic jams that single-occupancy cars do and can travel no faster than rush-hour traffic.
I thought it was ironic that, as we waited at a green light for some cars to clear a grid-locked intersection, I could see the anachronistic skeleton of what could have been an piece of a solution - the old monorail track from the 1962 World’s Fair:
A few years ago, we voted for funding and created an administrative infrastructure to build a modern monorail that would have connected two problematic parts of the city, operating above street level over its entire course. I think it would have been a great emblem for the city, extending the symbolism of the old monorail in a functional piece of infrastructure.
But the Monorail always had its enemies and, after acquiring land and plotting several versions of a route, the project imploded due to funding doubts and municipal squabbling. True, we’ll soon have a light rail system connecting downtown to the airport. A lot of that system, however, will operate at street grade and, in my view, won’t have the cache that the Monorail would have.
I was a newcomer, but from where I sat, what finally was the coup de grace of the monorail was the massive embezzlement of the project.
You have seen The Simpsons monorail episode, no?
You, sir, have kicked a sleeping dog. This is the most incompetent, brazenly mongoloid step-on-its-own dick city-state I’ve ever seen, and we lived through the final surreal and onanistic stages of the Big Dig. (I swear to god they would’ve built that thing better in Belgrade back when Yugoslavia was still communist.) But this, this, this abortion truly boggles the mind. And now Mayor Three Hunting Jowels has his precious frigging tunnel which will bankrupt the state and only 10% of the population will ever use if they even manage to complete the marvel for something under 12 billion dollars. Bridges that repeatedly capsize or sink, unfinished nuclear power plant sites named Whups, 6 lanes funneling down into 2, 200 million blown on consulting fees, the ferry system in general and I could keep going but oh yeah No Third Runway.
So here’s biting your ankle. Yeah, sure. A subway or an Elevated are the obvious solutions. And while we’re at it, have yourself another doobie. The nicest cities I’ve ever lived in, Munich, Basel, Zurich, San Fran, they all have street cars.