As big votes on whether to fund more transit in the Seattle area loom this fall, consider this: It seems everybody else is doing it.
Planners in San Francisco want to give people alternatives to driving, including more train, ferry and bus service. Even Vancouver, Wash., may add streetcars. Tacoma already said it’s looking at a citywide streetcar system.
This kind of improvements should be made in tandem with gradually adding tolls on existing roads to encourage more efficient behavior. As long as there are alternatives, tolls won’t penalize people with less income. Gradually changing behavior is part of the solution to gridlock.
The San Francisco Chronicle quotes the head of that area’s transit planning agency this way: “There’s no one silver bullet in dealing with congestion.”
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One response to “Why everybody’s building transit”
Seattle is so car-centric that the argument to support alternative methods of transportation may require attacking the topic from more angles. There is a very intelligent book by the name of Massive Change by Bruce Mau that brings up several different perspectives (www.massivechange.com). Health is a particularly powerful topic in the U.S. but commonly absent from discussions about transportation and the traffic crisis. The article about “sustainable mobility” in Massive Change states that road traffic deaths will increase by 67% by 2020 globally. Staggering figures such as that seem to be critical to the discussion.