Mike O’Neill rightly wonders if the Sierra Club is going to live up to its promise to support the next round of light rail. The club is still on the fence, apparently because park-and-ride lots encourage sprawl.
Let’s be honest: park-and-rides do, in fact, make it easier for people to mix cars and transit. But as Will says, it’s important to design with your users in mind. As long as you have to pay to park, you’re imposing a cost and letting people make a rational decision. And park-and-rides eventually facilitate denser, transit-oriented-development down the line (notice how all the parking lots in downtown Seattle are being developed). Finally, Seattle has chosen (for good or ill) to go down the path of most mid-sized American cities and decided to use basically one system for both intracity and intercity transit (ignoring Sounder for a moment). So park-and-rides are an inevitability as the system expands outside of the downtown core.
As always, one has to consdier the alternatvies, and I will be curious to see what Mike O’Brien at the club has to say on that at the forum Will mentions on March 20. Because it’s perfectly reasonable for the Sierra Club to be anti-light-rail, and they don’t even have to be advocating an alternative. They’re just an interest group with a singular mission: stop sprawl at all costs. That’s one angle, but it’s not the only angle.
But we as policymakers (yes, in the initiative-driven transit world, Joe Citizen is a policymaker) do need to weigh the alternatives. What, overall, is going to provide the best mix of decreasing fossil fuel usage, respecting the environment, increasing density, providing options to commuters, etc., etc. When you consider al the factors, ST 2.1 is a no-brainer.
Update: What Ben said. Habituating people to transit — even if only for part of their commute — is important in the short-term.
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