airlines

Dan Savage writes:

We may not get more light rail on the ballot this year, but once Sound Transit’s light rail line opens to the airport and people around here—people that don’t travel or don’t pay attention when they do, or the folks that are convinced that Seattle is perfect in every possible way just as it is (or was in 1964)— get a real taste of real mass transit, voters will be clamoring to approve and pay for more rail lines.

You hear this argument often, that once people get a taste for real transit, they’ll clamor for more. You hear it especially from folks who want to wait until 2010 to put another light rail measure on the ballot.

I take such sentiments at face value, but Dan’s comments got me thinking: how many people, exactly, are going to “taste” it between when it opens in mid-2009 (or December 2009 for the Airport Link) and a vote in November of 2010? Certainly it will be popular among a certain slice of the Seattle population — residents of the Rainier Valley, for example — but will folks who live in, say, Green Lake and commute to the Eastside even notice? Not to mention people who live on the other side of Lake Washington, people we’ll need to convince if we’re going to pass a measure that goes across the water.

To be sure, they’ll get glimpses. Hopefully there will be a raft of great PR for Sound Transit following the opening of the line (the rinky-dinky Streetcar even got a ton of ink, after all). And plenty of people will get a look at the train coming into the Airport as they drive down I-5 or SR 518. Maybe that will be enough to tip the balance. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that, for a large slice of the electorate, light rail will be just as theoretical in 2010 as it is today.