[stephengillie]

This reminds me of the Seattle Monorail, which continues to operate today. For a few dollars, you can ride swiftly and smoothly from one part of Downtown Seattle to another part of Downtown Seattle.

Some day, scientists hope, the value of the monorail will be seen. That day, we expect to extend the rail line to other communities. Meanwhile, we just pulled a tunneling machine out of its boring hole, continue to expand the Link Light Rail system, and are developing various trolley-based solutions such as the ones in South Lake Union and First Hill.

[Shivetya]

oh, that 600 million dollar per mile tunnel?

not a great use of transportation dollars, think of how many EV buses they could buy, which on the whole buses tend to go where people want and do it more often than light rail which not only costs a fortune to build but maintain as well

[stephengillie]

We had a mayor (McGinn) that wanted to connect neighborhoods with light rail and trolleys. We voted him out to get the crazy tunnel plan. And after spending all this money, we're going ahead with light rail and trolleys.

Everyone's been hearing about Bertha and the tunnel calamity, but almost nobody's heard about the trolley that connects 6 neighborhoods, was installed in about 6 months, and it's already done.

[goodcanadian]

I won't defend that project specifically because I know nothing about it, but I would like to offer a couple of comments:

As a passenger, I have always found the experience of riding rail to be far superior to riding a bus for a lot of reasons including but not limited to speed and comfort.

A train generally has much higher capacity than buses, and if well utilised, a lower operating cost per passenger. An ideal transport system will use trains for the high traffic trunk routes and a tightly integrated bus system as feeders for the train line. It should never be expressed as an either/or proposition. Both are necessary.

[stephengillie]

When traveling from Seattle to LA, Greyhound buses are better than Amtrak trains for several reasons: faster, cheaper, easier to book, and less risk of Civil Asset Forfeiture.

[goodcanadian]

Amtrak does not qualify as a proper rail system . . . besides, the comment was clearly referring to municipal transit. For Seattle to LA, I can't imagine any rail system ever beating flying.

[danielweber]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_People_Mover