As promised yesterday, here are more images from Link Light Rail’s spectacular opening weekend.
I’m surprised how few people, now and during Link’s years of construction, noted the utter appropriateness of the route’s principal siting on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—formerly Empire Way, named for the “empire builder,” James J. Hill—a railroad tycoon.
Like a lot of Western towns, Seattle was made, and nearly broken, by the railroads. When the Northern Pacific decided to build its own company town (Tacoma) instead of making Seattle its western terminus, Seattle boosters persuaded Hill to bring his rival Great Northern line here. (The NP and GN eventually merged into the Burlington Northern, now BNSF.)
As big rail built Seattle as a center of shipping and industry, local rail built the city’s neighborhoods. In a few cases this was literally true, as developers built trolley lines to service their newly-built tracts.
Now, civic planning bureaucrats and “urban density” advocates hope that can happen again.
The operative phrase is “transit oriented development.” You might have read about it in The Stranger or at Publicola.
The idea is that, alongside the shiny new tracks and the trains that run on them, there should be shiny new residences, stores, and commercial structures. These would attract more regular riders for the trains, while bringing new economic activity to these neighborhoods.
(And they’d provide work for the construction biz, Seattle Democrats’ most loyal backers. And they’d help slow the ongoing tilt of the region’s population ratio from the city to the suburbs, a tilt that affects the city’s state and federal funding clout in many ways.)
So you get townhomes, neo-rowhouses, senior housing projects with ground-floor retail, midrise apartment/condo structures, and the promise of many more.
Some of these would be on tracts now owned by the city or Sound Transit, which were used as staging areas during Link’s long construction period. (It’s the taxpayers’ bad luck that the project bought this land while prices were going up, and is selling it as prices are going down.)
Of course, people already live and work in these neighborhoods (despite what you might surmise from “urban pioneer” stories in the local lifestyle mags). Light rail’s benefits shouldn’t just be for the new (read: upscale white) residents and workers, or for those current residents who happen to own saleable land.
For far too long, Seattle’s entire southeast quadrant (save for the Lake Washington waterfront) has been the city’s ignored stepchild. It’s the first place where halfway houses and social-service agencies get sited, and the last place where fancy shops and restaurants go. It’s got a lot of households that didn’t fare well when the region as a whole boomed, and that aren’t doing well now.
I’d like to see a transit oriented development that enhances the lives of south Seattle’s current populace, and doesn’t merely displace it.
Yep, I was at the first day of Link Light Rail service.
Then I came back for day two.
I took a lot of images. I’m still sorting out my favorites.
So look for more in the next day or two.
It was a glorious two-day celebration of, well, of what?
Of yet another shiny New Seattle monument to world-class-osity? Not really.
To our modest li’l seaport village finally deserving to be called a Big League City? Nope.
To a cool new way to travel from downtown (almost) to the airport? Uh-uh.
Seattle’s first urban transit solution to run longer than 1.3 miles? Not even that.
No, this weekend marked the true beginning of Seattle’s Century 21. Through what is essentially pre-car technology, we’ve launched the first practical step toward a post-car era.
And it’s swift, bright, clean, and fun too!
Crowds, thankfully, were not as totally overbearing as organizers had hoped/warned. (After all, the trains will keep running after this weekend, just not for free and not with clowns and buskers performing at the stations.)
Link gets down to business on Monday. Don’t look for clues to its eventual level of success in its initial paid ridership. What will count will be long-term ridership trends. That, and also the “transit oriented development” projects penciled in on what are now vacant lots adjoining the stations. And those won’t likely get underway until people are building homes and commercial buildings again.
…Where you can get your energy-saving TV, your energy-saving washing machine, and, soon, your energy-saving transport vehicle.
…just where Link light rail will take us starting next month, I found myself directed to a Google Maps page that still includes the Longacres horse racing track. Alas, Longacres disappeared in 1992, when the World Wide Web was little more than a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes.
By the way: The light rail’s initial southern terminus, the “Tukwila-International Boulevard Station,” is smack dab in the middle of nothing but Sea-Tac Airport’s outer sprawl. There will be a shuttle bus from there to the airport terminal until December, when Link’s own airport stop’s ready. I’ve found no official word on whether any other Metro routes will be revised to stop anywhere near the TIB. Right now, none do, except for a couple of commute-only express runs.
My longtime acquaintance and zine publishing veteran Wendi Dunlap has launched a crusade to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
(via Chuck Mathias):
So the big-wigs are getting the gazillion-dollar tunnel nobody else wants (Guys! I don’t care how temporarily cheap the depression’s made gas–cars are OVER! If you had the foresight of the average rat sniffing a trap, you’d use the few dollars left before hyperinflation sets in to renovate the state’s railroads, including the TRACKS THAT ARE ALREADY UNDER THE VIADUCT!) Just another notch to add to their shootin’ arns, I guess, next to the monorail lots of other people wanted but didn’t get, and the baseball stadium lots of other people didn’t want, but got stuck with anyway. There are probably other examples, but I’m a Tacoman and not well-informed (sorry for the redundancy).I guess the question is: Are liberal oligarchs supposed to be better than the other kind? Your site’s a treasure, by the way–about the only blog of a strictly local nature I never miss. Chuck Mathias
So the big-wigs are getting the gazillion-dollar tunnel nobody else wants (Guys! I don’t care how temporarily cheap the depression’s made gas–cars are OVER! If you had the foresight of the average rat sniffing a trap, you’d use the few dollars left before hyperinflation sets in to renovate the state’s railroads, including the TRACKS THAT ARE ALREADY UNDER THE VIADUCT!) Just another notch to add to their shootin’ arns, I guess, next to the monorail lots of other people wanted but didn’t get, and the baseball stadium lots of other people didn’t want, but got stuck with anyway. There are probably other examples, but I’m a Tacoman and not well-informed (sorry for the redundancy).I guess the question is: Are liberal oligarchs supposed to be better than the other kind?
Your site’s a treasure, by the way–about the only blog of a strictly local nature I never miss.
Chuck Mathias
“We need a new mayor.com.”
Greg Nickels has more than worn out his welcome.
He’s wrested a lot of administrative power away from the City Council, only to use it for little more than developer giveaways and meaningless granstanding measures. He let the Sonics go with little more than a wave goodbye. He might have not predicted the December snows, but he sure didn’t seem to have a clue how to act when they got here. His interpretation of “roads and transit” seems to be becoming “ROADS, with a hint of transit flavoring.”
Hell, if nobody else will run against him, I will.
I’ve got no money and no experience in elective office. All I’ve got are ideas (some of which are good) and a sense of judgment (which sometimes proves wise).
…here’s what’s happenin’:
…is over, and the party races are just as muddled as before. In other nooze:
