The Sunday Seattle Times front
page article “How to buy a home in the Seattle area” exemplifies their inept
response to Seattle’s high cost for homes. The bar chart on the front page shows how the price of
homes varies inversely with commute times. One would think “maybe” the way to make homes more
affordable would be to reduce demand by making the surrounding communities more
attractive by reducing commute times into Seattle. Instead the article provides “A Homebuying Survival
Guide” to a “successful” purchase.
One way to reduce commute times is
to reduce congestion by attracting more riders to public transit. The Times clearly understands the importance
of public transit in Seattle, lamenting in an April 26th Traffic Lab front-page article, ”Bus Agency can’t keep up
with Seattle’s burgeoning ridership”; “Drivers can’t be hired, trained fast
enough; no space for new buses”.
More than two years ago a 4/03/16 editorial “Questions on
Transit Need Clear Answers” opined “Sound Transit options should include bus
rapid transit (BRT) in combination with added P&R capacity as a way of
dramatically increasing transit capacity into the city without spending
billions on light rail.” Yet Sound Transit’s quarterly bus trips
only increased from 115,163 in 2012 4th quarter to 120,400 in the 2017 4th
quarter. That comparable total average express-bus-weekday boarding
only increased from 54,345 to 61,526 during the five years; hardly a “dramatic
increase”.
Yet the Times continued to support Sound Transit despite a
11/04/16 article’s answer to the
question “Would ST3 reduce congestion?” was “It would not”. Even “leading
proponents don’t promise that traffic will improve”. The best they
could say was the plan “offers an escape from traffic misery for people who can
reach the stations on foot, on a feeder bus, or via park-and-ride”.
Later, their
6/19/17 edition front-page article “Here’s why I-5 is such a messl” identifies
the problem; the increased “daily vehicle volume”. Again, the best they could say was:
Sound Transit 3’s light-rail system, as it expands over
the next 25 years, will do little to ease I-5 traffic, but it will give some
commuters an escape hatch to avoid it”.
Again, one would think, a newspaper would question the efficacy
of Sound Transit spending $54 billion on a transportation system that won’t
reduce congestion, something they could easily have done by urging they be
audited.
Instead of urging Sound Transit be audited their 6/19/17 Times
article, ”Can’t state ease I-5 traffic? Fixes exist, but most of them are
pricey”, concludes:
The most
obvious way to reduce traffic on I-5 is to reduce the number of cars on the
road. The most obvious way to do that is to make it more expensive for
them to be there.
They follow their 6/19/17 I-5 “solution” with a 6/26/17 edition
headline “Time to pay? Tolling doesn’t get much love, but it eases
gridlock”, presumably urging tolls on all the major roadways.
Today’s Times apparently simply doesn’t recognize the “way to
reduce the number of cars on the road” is not to "make it more expensive” but
to offer them an alternative; access to public transit. Without an alternative the only thing
tolls do is increase the cost of commuting, a sure way of increasing demand for,
and costs of, Seattle homes.
The bottom line is they’ve abandoned their more than
two-year old demand “Sound Transit consider bus rapid transit (BRT) in
combination with added P&R capacity as a way of dramatically increasing
transit capacity into the city without spending billions on light rail.”
The entire are will pay a very heavy price if they continue to
do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment