Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#2How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit.
Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#3How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit. Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
The population is increasing, so car commutes are going to get worse no matter what the city government does.
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#4How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit. Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Are there any specific actions Seattle has taken to make the driving experience worse?
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#5Here's to hoping Portland's increasingly-awful traffic situation reaches a similar inflection point where the misery forces people to do something other than drive.
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#6How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit. Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Quality of life down for most drivers, maybe. But by focusing on transit, moving around and in/out of the city becomes a lot easier for more people than it becomes worse for, so I'd say overall quality of life goes way up.
Best of luck to you in your new city :)
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#7Public transit in Seattle works for many commuters but the two largest residential neighborhoods in the city are still poorly served. If you are not near the main line getting to a bug stop can be very difficult. Local bus service still seems to be lacking in many areas of the city.
For me it's no problem, both my office and apartment are on the C Line route but if I lived in North Admiral I would probably just ride my bicycle to work.
Public transit in Seattle is still not convenient or even possible for actually getting around the city. I still use Uber/Lyft or my own car or motorcycle to get around other than getting to work and even then I prefer to ride the motorcycle in traffic over being crammed into the sardine can C-Line.
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#8How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit. Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Are there any specific actions Seattle has taken to make the driving experience worse?
I think it's more a question of what they haven't done as the city has grown. If you increase the populace, but don't increase the amount of roads and parking, driving gets worse. (I'm not arguing that that's a bad thing.)
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#9To add to the points raised in the article, Seattle’s public transit system and transit policy are just plain good. Buses are clean/new, frequent, and on-time; trains (while they don’t yet extend as far as they need to) are reliable and have good coverage along frequented routes; HOV lanes are (finally!!!) present along the entirety of common longer commutes (especially across the lake).
The bus system is especially critical to this. It doesn’t take billions of dollars to add a new bus route, or make buses more frequent on a route, so congestion issues at bus stops are largely addressable. The routes are also generally being made more convenient, so the added benefit of driving in a car is diminished.
I live in New York now, and while the subway coverage here is certainly unbeatable, its unreliability, dirtiness, congestion, and the borderline-criminal mismanagement of public transit infrastructure in NYC (including buses) make me really miss living in Seattle.
Re: Seattle Is Winning the War on the Car Commute
#10How Seattle is winning the war on cars: make driving a car into the city a living hell, and actively peruse road expansions that make commute times worse to move people over to mass transit. Mass transit use up, quality of life down. I've grown up slightly outside of Seattle and have been working at some startups, but I'm leaving at the end of this year.
Absolutely agree. Traffic in Seattle is some of the absolute worst in the country. 25% of workers drive to work only because there isn't even enough room on the road to fit more of them. Getting around Seattle is a massive pain in the ass and public transit just isn't keeping up.