Good recap of the monorail situation from The Stranger

Critical Mess.

We were clear about what was wrong with the SMP: It was the finance plan, not the system itself. A major Fortune 500 engineering firm was ready to build the 14-mile route, a route that had been forged after hundreds of public meetings and city council scrutiny. Unfortunately, the SMP had overestimated its tax base by about 30 percent—leading to a 30 percent revenue shortfall. The money wasn't there. Thus, the junk bond plan.

Comments

[Roger]

The thing that has always puzzled me about enthusiasm for the monorail and Sound Transit's light rail is the high cost per passenger moved and the rather limited usefulness of the routes proposed for 99% of the people in the city. Unless you live within ten blocks of one of the stations and work or shop within ten blocks of another of the stations, it's a hopeles exercise, at a huge cost. You could simply take that money and subsidize work-at-home programs and make a much larger impact, improving the quality of life for the people involved to a much greater extent, as well.

Think about how people really are wired: next time you're at a store with a big parking lot, check out the empty outer reaches of the lot and the queue of people waiting to grab a spot in some cases only 20 yards closer. To think that those same people are going to walk a mile to a station is simply living in a fantasy world.

[David Sucher]

None of the mass transit technologies are meant to deal with current-day congestion etc. They are built to create new capacity but will not of course -- except if you add 'park-and-ride lots' -- serve another farther than ten blocks or so, unless you make a parallel investment in buses etc etc.

So Roger, above, is not altogether wrong -- though his example of the parking lot can be turned around pretty simply: of course people don't want to walk through ugly parking lots. But give them a pleasant street and it is a different story indeed.

In any case, the only way such group systems make sense -- and they do indeed make sense -- is that they offer the possibility of a "new geography" of denser mixed-used shopping districts based on this new capacity.

[Greg Bartell]

I Agree. I's all about Seattle growing up and being a Big City.
What gets overlooked in the rail or monorail debates is most people look at the existing city defining the new rail system, ("aw...it will just take riders off the busses"). What will really happen is the opposite, with the new land uses that will emerge around the stations. This will redefine the city in a big way with higher density mixed-use development that adds density and preserves single family neighborhoods . Think Vancouver. Metro has already done it in Kirkland and Redmond, and is planning it at the Northgate south lot in conjunction with the development there. It's also on the boards in south Snohomish county with the new park and ride on ramps that Sound Transit is doing.
Back to the riders presently on the busses. How about ciruclator buses, or re-routing of existing routes to get people from their homes to the rapid transit?