Seattle Monorail Blog: More on The Stranger

Friday, November 18, 2005

I forgot to mention that the Obit is part of a bigger front-page spread of articles about the monorail and Mayor Gridlock.

At 12:40 PM, Sirkulat said...: I couldn't support the proposed route. Of the route options between Ballard and West Seattle, the Downtown Waterfront (displacing the doomed viaduct), then up to Battery Street to Denny Way to Westlake Ave to SPU, then under the shipping canal and then enter Ballard, has twice the ridership and development potential.

While it was management and Seattle 'establishment' that doomed the monorail, grassroots supporters were coddled into believing the project as proposed had enough merit to survive, and casually or snobbishly dismissed all concerns about financing, physical impacts, inexorable urban development and basic engineering.

The Circulator Monorail, (the core of the Seattle Circulator Plan), the least-cost, least impact, most productive proposal since its first public submission to Sound Transit in 2000, yet remains unpublished.

The Circulator Monorail: 6 running trains every 4 minutes on 3.5 miles of 'single-track' guideway (added to the original monorail) to 10 destination-stations between First and Capital Hills, 5th Ave Downtown, and Lower Queen Anne with 2 stations shared by Link LRT. Cost: approx $500 million.

Most people were only interested in the dazzling proposal that looked better than it tasted.