all the potential streetcar corridors will be difficult to implement, as they depend on LIDs without Vulcan as the majority landowner and they will require changes to parallel parking and two-way turn lanes, both tough political issues. the federal grants needed will be quite competitive, as there are many other transportation needs.

Oops, I made a swear on this blog but he is truly a lowlife who gets rich on the misery of others and is by far the WORST of the absentee landlords in the U District.

I sincerely wish the city had seized his property for drug abatement after all the shit he spewed following a drug related murder in them (this was about 5 or 6 years ago). Basically, he tried to blame the drug deals in his complex on the presence of Teen Feed and a Young Adult Homeless shelter in neighboring churches and not his own negligence and indifference to his renters.

There’s nothing I’d like to do more than put a rock through the window of one of his Rolls Royces. If you ever see one with the vanity plate DK1 (or 2, 3, etc), you know which asshole is driving it.

It has its own ROW because MAX trains are very large.

2) That figure of $3.5 Billion is limited to development within 2 blocks of the streetcar. Your smug defense of dedicated ROW again fails to see the fiscal reality of what a streetcar is for.

Homer Williams, a lead developer and booster of the Pearl District has adamantly stated that the Streetcar was the key investment that made it successful and spurred on further development. He even went so far as to repeatedly tell the developers of a similarly styled development in Texas that they would be stupid to not put in a streetcar.

3) You’re good at twisting words, aren’t you? You used speed and efficiency as positives but when presented with an example of a system that is both fast and efficient, you throw in different parameters.

It’s great that you want to apply the scale of subways to systems like these, but it’s just not realistic given the scale the streetcar hopes to take.

They want to maximize space without tunneling or taking away too many parking lanes. They also want to capitalize on rail bias. They don’t, however, want a system that blitzes through the idyllic walking scenes of the neighborhood they want to create.

I can guarantee to you now that they will absolutely make intermediate zones dedicated and faster. Areas like zones on Eastlake that are lined with the backs of buildings instead of actual storefronts.

And of course if transit has to be as fast or better than a car and it’s pacing all this purported traffic… we can say that on one end, it meets that purpose. And you don’t even have to park.

Within downtown Portland, MAX functions as a second (better) streetcar line. People can use it to get from one area of downtown to another. It stops every few blocks. Within downtown it does not travel at top speed. It circulates pedestrians. The difference is that it has its own ROW. All I’m saying is that streetcars would be better investments if they followed that model.

If we are talking about building streetcars all the way from downtown to Ballard, I think the MAX north line should be our inspiration, rather than the SLU streetcar. Sure, a streetcar won’t go as fast as a light rail train, and it won’t have the same capacity, but giving it its own ROW along a busy corridor within the city seems to be the obvious way to go.

2) Claiming that $3.5 billion in investment in Portland’s Pearl District is a result of the streetcar is like saying that anything built in South Lake Union is the result of our streetcar. The Pearl was booming long before the streetcar went in. Do you seriously think that a single one of the huge condo buildings currently under construction in that area of Portland is there just because of the streetcar? Right. And Amazon is only building in South Lake Union because of the Seattle Streetcar.

3) As for the Monorail… It makes no intermediate stops, it is not integrated with the rest of our transit system, and it goes to a quasi-desirable destination. Despite those glaring shortcomings, you claim that the real problem with the monorail is that is it too fast? Interesting hypothesis. I’m not proposing that we build streetcars based on the monorail model.

Well… people are saying that now. It’s not as though gridlock on 1st Ave is something that people will only realize exists once a steetcar is built. It is fairly obvious. Let’s just do it right from the outset.

You don’t build a library with empty shelves, and then rely on public outcry to later convince politicians that they need to put books in the library. You buy the books WHEN you build the building. A streetcar that sits stuck in traffic is analogous: It is a waste of money. Why are we accepting half-solutions for transit when we wouldn’t accept them for other public investments?

But the whole getting to Husky Stadium on gameday becomes a leadpipe cinch.

The Portland Streetcar is not simply cute as you inaccurately portray it, it draws development by creating a transit link that is faster than walking but distinctly tuned toward taking people from one pedestrian zone to another.

The Monorail moves people quickly from one area to another– but why is the Seattle Center a moneypit? It has _FAST_ transit!

And don’t belittle the streetcar further by comparing it to full LRT– it’s all a function of scale. The MAX light rail service is a commuter system while the streetcar is a low-speed neighborhood circulator. That “cute” streetcar has brought in 3.5 Billion dollars in investment, or $875 million per mile. MAX on the other hand brings in about $136 million per mile. I defy you to propose how we achieve $875 million per mile in investment with a bus.

How much did the Portland Streetcar cost? About $70-80 million, depending on who you ask. In development impact, it draws in 10x that initial investment. How is that not cost-effective?

It would be nice to give the streetcar its own ROW, but sometimes all it takes is allowing the streetcar the ability to bypass certain bottlenecks and local back-ups. Taking the easy route on this sort of thing suggests a blatant disregard for both development opportunities and the communities served.