Imagine a Tunnel Boring Machine
Bruce Agnew really likes to dream, doesn't he? The man seems to think that if we just close our eyes and think really hard, we can fix our transportation problems for free. David Brewster, in response, smacks down the foot ferries concept (which I think has more merit than Brewster admits, but isn't the cure-all that its proponents imagine).
Sorry, Bruce, there's no magic pill we can swallow and fix our transportation problems. The only answer is to do like every other city on planet earth: spend billions of dollars on new high-capacity transit systems. It's going to be messy, expensive, over-budget and inconvenient. It's going to require moving mountains of earth, pouring tons of concrete, laying miles of rail, and yes, inconveniencing some people. Suck it up and deal with it.
The Seattle area has generated an obscene -- almost criminal -- amount of wealth in the last decade. We've got the money, we've got the plans, we just don't always have the will to execute.
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Something is seriously wrong with a day when I agree with Bruce Agnew, but it seems unfair to characterize his article as a "magic pill". I've been on the west side of Puget Sound for ten years now, occasionally going to Seattle as a foot passenger, and Agnew's points are well taken. The easiest way to critique this briefly is to look at Brewster's pabulum.
Brewster claims ferries take a lot of parking. Bull. Ride the bus or your bicycle to the ferry. Winslow has ten full size buses meeting the ferry and less parking than Harborview. Seattle has no parking for ferry foot traffic, but the afternoon boats going west are packed.
The commuter boats I've ridden have been full of regular daily commuters. They're inherently more efficient than using a car ferry to move foot traffic but will always require inter-agency cooperation and funding. Which brings us to point three-
All of the counties and jurisdictions west of the Sound have to cooperate- and the potential and motivation for such cooperation is very high, because individually we each fail. Mason County runs buses to Bremerton and Olympia, and the Indians run free shuttle buses to their casinos, which usually have the best entertainment and food around.
Foot ferries have to slow down in one critical place. 'Nuff said about that.
Now- best for the last- Brewster says we need to spend money, not on foot ferries, but on car ferries. That's right, he thinks we should continue subsidizing the WSDOT dumping of cars and trucks onto overstressed roads and communities west of Puget Sound, in spite of the fact that most of us who use the ferries can't afford to take our cars with us and, considering traffic and parking problems in Seattle, wouldn't take our cars with us if we could.
With whatever degree of sincerity (I still can't believe we agree on something) Agnew has rung all the changes perfectly in his article, which is well worth studying. Brewster, not so much.
You make a fair point, and I don't mean to say that ferries can't be part of the solution. When I said "magic pill" I was talking more generally about the sum total of Agnew's/Cascadia's proposed "solutions": the road tunnel under downtown, the foot ferries, and the "doodlebug."
He seems to think that if we implmenet all these weird, cheap, offbeat solutions, we'll solve our transportation problems. That's the sentiment I disagree with.