The Cherry Life

Me: “A suffragette”

Second later…

“I knew you weren’t a real suffragist”

My partner: “How did you know that?”

I'm a huge proponent of public transit, rail in specific, and I'm very glad that the greater Seattle area is finally starting to see some solid light rail infrastructure sprouting up in the form of the 1 and 2 lines, but that in no way stops me from critiquing the decisions made in planning and implementation.

Light Rail, in it's colloquial form here in the US, is basically always a compromise solution. It's cheaper than subways, can make good use of existing right-of-way around freeways, and can function as a kind of low-capacity commuter rail in the suburbs while behaving more like a tram or streetcar in downtown areas. It is crucially, however, not a streetcar, nor is it a commuter rail. Streetcars make frequent stops and are optimized for dense areas with lots of traffic. Commuter rails are larger and stop less frequently, optimized for bringing suburban residents into city centers. Commuter rail should, however, be independent of street traffic so it can travel at higher speeds. For this reason, most of the Link light rail system in seattle is actually not at-grade (street level), but on either elevated or sub-grade track. Downtown, the lightrail actually functions as a low-capacity low-frequency subway system in what used to be the bus tunnel (we don't have time, but yes it was stupid). Everywhere else, it's up on elevated tracks that largely follow the freeway system.

There are three stations, all immediately south of that Mount Baker elevated station, where the Link actually runs at-grade. These stations run through the historic low income immigrant neighborhoods of southeast seattle. Here, the trains are forced to stop at red lights, interact with crossing and left-turning traffic, and even cross through sidewalks and terrifyingly narrow pedestrian islands. They could have built elevated track here, as they did everywhere else, but they didn't. they didn't want to spend the money. I have personally watched light rail cars carrying hundreds of people have to wait two full minutes for cars turning left in front of them, delaying trains so like, 5 people could drive there. Once it reaches the end of this low income immigrant-dominant neighborhood, however, the Link returns to it's above-grade status, with Mount Baker being the first elevated stop. You want to know how this woman, who claims she was misdirected by her GPS, probably ended up here? I would bet anything she tried to make a turn at the intersection just before the stop and got confused. The intersection, for reference, looks like this:

I'm not saying it's an easy mistake to make, but given the number of people who drive through here every day, it's honestly not that surprising that someone, especially someone who is from out of town, or someone who is used to shared streetcar lanes, would eventually make this mistake. When you're dealing with a city of hundreds of thousands of people, it's only a matter of time before a mistake like this happens. but it is only possible for it to happen because of the decisions made in the planning process, and one of those decisions was effectively "we can save money if we make everything worse in that part of town where all the foreign poors live", and so they built the thing at-grade, instead of keeping it elevated like everywhere else.