Doesn't transit decrease congestion a lot? No, not really, although if congestion is allowed to get bad enough, every little bit makes a difference. But it shouldn't be allowed to get that bad to begin with, because you pay a lot for not much capability with transit.

On a different thread, we got into the issue of just how much DOES transit help congestion and I asserted that, in the grand scheme of things, it wasnt much. I learned way back in Chem 140 that big numbers intimidate people (Did you know that there are about 602,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules in a Tablespoonful of water?). And when you LOOK at transit numbers, they also look impressive. All of Metros buses moved 216,000 passengers per typical weekday in 1998, with the average trip length being 6.25 miles. That's one million three hundred fifty thousand miles on a weekday, and that looks and sounds impressive. But then, so did the Tablespoonful of water.

If we convert this to a two way commute, this would satisfy the following daily commute requirements: Husky Stadium to Marysville for 19,286 commuters Husky Stadium to Tacoma for 17,308 commuters Husky Stadium to Gig Harbor for 14,063 commuters Husky Stadium to Olympia for 10,887 commuters Husky stadium to Bellingham for 7670 commuters.

Now all of these passenger miles, even on weekdays, arent commuter miles and arent during the commute period, so if you correct for that, you have to decrease these values (in terms of commute time assistance) by about a third. So the entire Metro bus service provides the EQUIVALENT capacity to commute about 12,000 people from Tacoma to the UW. And you are spending a third of a Billion dollars a year for this capacity.

So what does this mean. A couple of things. The greatest benefit BY FAR occurs to people who live within Seattle. And the effect of Metro on the commute (though substantial for those few people who use it) is relatively trivial for the area as a whole.

-- Craig Carson (craigcar@crosswinds.net), January 19, 2000

Answers

You're forgetting that our great DOT engineers and planners do not know how to build adequate roads. They do not have a clue what the term "flow" means.

We need alternative forms of transportation. PERIOD!

-- gregg (greggk@gte.net), January 21, 2000.

Craig,

I don't know how much energy you have, but this is tiresome, and I wouldn't blame you if you took a vacation....

-- Marsha (acorn_nut@hotmail.com), January 21, 2000.

Actually Marsha, it seems to get easier the longer you do it. My c\ drive has accumulated an awful lot of PDF files from downloading articles and studies to rebut the same old hackneyed objections. I may have to burn a CD for them to free up disk space and get them organized. I also have another 128K of RAM on order ($145 for PC100, using the money I DIDN'T pay for my son's car registration), so things are looking up.

Seriously though, it's amazing how many people can become reasonable when they find that the "facts" they have been lead to believe are true, are not only not facts, but are contrary to the reality. Some don't. As I have said, for these people it is a religion and if they had there way all infidels would undergo conversion by the sword. I keep this up for the former. I don't really have any hope for the latter.

-- (craigcar@crosswind.net), January 21, 2000.