rapid transit

Seattle’s Flying Tram System

By Matt the Engineer on March 9, 2011

Seattle is a wonderful city for walking.  Each of the neighborhoods have interesting lively main streets, beautiful old houses, parks, pools, libraries, and many other amenities.   However, thanks to our hub-and-spoke commuter-based bus system it can be very difficult to get from neighborhood to neighborhood without a car.  Connecting our neighborhoods with grade separated high [...]

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Queen Anne Gondola

By Matt the Engineer on April 30, 2010

Crystal Mountain has began installing a $5.3M gondola to bring more skiiers up to the top of its mountain.  With 18 cars it will bring 450 people up an hour, and has the capacity to add another 18 cars.  The total run is around 8,000 feet and will take a bit under 10 minutes.   If [...]

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Replacing Big Car Trips With Little Skinny Car Trips.

By Matt the Engineer on May 5, 2008

Depending on the season, the weather, and my mood I carpool, take a bus, pedal, drive, walk, or ride a scooter to get around. Although I’d love to be able to use public transportation or my own motive power to travel everywhere, it’s nice to have the option of using fast personal transportation. However, millions of people choosing the convenience of a car has led to our current oil and environmental situation.

I’d like to recommend a partial, temporary, imperfect, yet practical solution: the scooter. Sure, I only get to drive mine four months out of the year. Yes, I can only fit two people and perhaps 3 bags of groceries. But these are really the only two compromises compared to a car. The benefits include:

* 100+ mpg
* much faster in city streets in traffic
* easy to find parking
* you travel outside, in contact with your environment
* you can park around 4 of them per parking spot
* garages downtown charge you as little as $4/day

If small personal vehicles were used more often for short trips, this could save quite a bit of fuel, parking, and traffic. It’s no replacement for a good transit system, but it’s nice to have something to get around in until we get build one. It looks like the council is interested in doing something to help scooterists out, but it’s at the early stages at best. Seattle would be doing itself a favor by making the city a bit more scooter friendly.

Did I mention they get over 100 mpg?

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