[stephengillie]

Bus routes are a circuit, so they are more heavily impacted by traffic than other modes of transportation. Thus, heavy traffic regularly makes Seattle's commuter buses 10-20 minutes late. The bus from Mountlake Terrace can sometimes be over an hour late, and rush hour makes this a 2-hour ride on top of the wait.

With a car, you can hop off the freeway and take a side street and you're there in 30-40 minutes instead of 2+ hours.

If you want to discuss borderline-criminal mismanagement, there's the $50 billion ST3 plan. We could put one WA State resident on the moon for that price.

[loeg]

> With a car, you can hop off the freeway and take a side street and you're there in 30-40 minutes instead of 2+ hours.

You're comparing the best case time with a car to the worst case time of a bus. How long do you think the car will take in 5 years, or 10, as the region continues to grow?

> We could put one WA State resident on the moon for that price.

Perhaps, but what's the utility of that? Infrastructure costs money and the region needs mass transit or it will suffer from increased gridlock and commute times.

[stephengillie]

The best time with a car was 15-20 minutes. I haven't had that commute in 3 years so I'm not sure how it is today. Seattle is at maximum capacity, and it's spilling out into the larger region. I don't forsee commutes getting much worse, as if commute times get any longer, fewer people will commute, balancing out travel times over weeks to months.

A call to the absurd is a way to illustrate my frustration with the relative lack of return on the investment.