Posted inUncategorized

Fire and rain and blame

I keep getting emails from friends asking if I'm okay. The national news has been saturated with reports of the flooding in western Washington. I'm fine, largely because I live within the long-established urban footprint of Seattle (downtown, happily). Most of the damage has come in the exurbs, and much of it is human-caused. This is our second straight year of unusual flooding. It won't be the last.

This reminds me of my return to Arizona in 2000. Every year forest fires would erupt threatening cabins on the Mogollon Rim (pronounced Mug-e-on) in the High Country. One particularly devastating fire began in 2002 when a woman had a fight with her boss (boyfriend?) while they were on a trip to service his vending machines (I am not speaking in euphemism here). She stalked off into the forest, wearing only shorts, tank top and flip-flops, carrying a towel, cigarettes and lighter — a survival kit I never learned about as a Boy Scout. When she became lost, she lit a "signal fire" that turned into one of the worst conflagrations in state history. (And you wonder why Arizona is rated America's dumbest state). Comedy aside, I was puzzled because these areas of the High Country had been mostly uninhabited National Forest land when I was a boy. Then I drove up and saw the "cabins" were mostly subdivisions plopped down amid stands of combustible pine trees.

These disasters, repeated around the West and indeed the nation, bring large public burdens, from relief efforts and firefighting, to higher insurance costs. Yet nothing is being done to address the cycle of disaster. And with climate change and other environmental degradation, we ain't seen nothing yet.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Lies, damned lies, and rail transit

At least two big rail transit measures are on the ballot around the country this November, maybe more. In Seattle, voters will be asked to approve light-rail expansion. And in California, there's a truly transformative measure to build a high-speed rail network.

Both will probably fail, both due to the financial crisis but, sadly, also to the pervasive myths and muddled thinking that keep America frozen with an increasingly unworkable 1965 transportation network. This post will attempt to take a few of these on:

  • Buses: Many people who claim to support transit advocate expanding bus service, saying buses are cheaper and more flexible. Unfortunately this is also the bait-and-switch position of anti-rail, anti-transit forces — they will initially support bus transit but then oppose actually funding it. In any event, while buses have their place, they are not enough for a balanced, multi-modal 21st century transportation system.
Buses get stuck in the same traffic congestion that snarls cars — and politicians will never create enough bus-only lanes to alleviate this. In downtown Seattle, a bus-riders heaven, buses are routinely clotted up even with bus lanes. Your bus is not only late, but it can be the fourth or fifth one back in a line stopped to take on passengers. Good luck getting there if you walk slowly. Buses with stairs are hard for many people to enter. And buses have a sigma in many communities. As I say, buses have a valuable place. But they can't replace rail for reliability, ease of entry, ease of riding, rider appeal and passenger-miles-per-unit of energy.
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