Orphan Road

I didn't live in Seattle when Sound Transit planned the route of the light rail, so stop me if this has already been debated to death. Also, I know it's far too late to change anything. I'm just curious.

Can someone tell me why, exactly, Link takes it's expensive and circuitus path? Considering it will take as long (or longer) as it currently does via bus to get from downtown to the airport, this would not seem like a great idea.

One would think a straight line would be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest route. This would take us through some industrial areas, which would seem to have inexpensive land. It would also drive by Boeing Field, which could be useful if it ever runs as a commercial airport. Plus it seems like there would have been little/no boring reqired.

Yes, the route drives through a few communities, but this seems like a reason to not put light rail there - you end up stopping at stoplights. Building communities around transit seems like a much better idea.

I imagine a strong difference between city-based transit, that tries to conform to neighborhoods, and regional transit, that should be built for speed. This is clearly regional transit, but seems to be designed as city transit.

I wasn't able to attend the ST workshop but I did look through the pdf that STB has on his page (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2008/01/31/2004157186.pdf). I wasn't really surprised by most of it. There was one glaring omission though.

In ST2 there was money to do a study for HCT from the UW to Ballard via NE45th. I don't see anything about that. Everyone know that getting East/West in this city is a nightmare and ST and Metro really need to address this. I think that they should have at least 3 high quality E/W BRT routes that help people get from one side of the city to the other and allow them to transfer from LINK to RapidRide or other local service. If we aren't going to have light rail for a while we have got to have a good BRT network.

(Full size http://students.washington.edu/adambp/mytake.jpg)

I have done a quick little overlay (see above) of what this would look like on their map. All of these routes exist so service hours could be taken from those routes. Also with LINK some current bus service can be redistributed to help pay for this. Possibly on busy streets like denny the buses could go a block or two north and use bus only streets.