The First Hill Streetcar is coming right along.
Which begs the question, with all the buses that run along Broadway … why a streetcar?
Well, the other week, I flipped through a book called “Stuff White People Like”, and I finally found the answer.
147 Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus
147 Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus
“… White people all support the idea of public transportation and will be happy to tell you about how subways and streetcars/trams have helped to energize cities like Chicago and Portland. They will tell you all about the energy and cost savings of having people abandon their cars for public transportation and how they hope that one day they can live in a city where they will be car-free.
At this point, you are probably thinking about the massive number of buses that serve your city and how you have never seen a white person riding them. To a white person a bus is essentially a giant minivan that continually stops to pick up progressively smellier people. You should never, ever point this out to a white person. It will make them recognize that they might not love public transportation as much as they thought, and then they will feel sad …”
And now you know.
The great Streetcar Folly:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA699.pdf
Yes please trust the CATO Institute, they are an unbiased source.
Please ignore their strong ties to the oil and automobile industries.
Streetcar systems are not really “mass transit” per se as they are circulators in an urban area, as they don’t need fuel, can smoothly accelerate and brake which is valued in a dense urban route with a lot of stopping and moving, and break down less. I don’t know the area though, so for all I know this might be some useless tourist transport along the lines of the monorail, but I leave that judgment to you.
The Streetcar Swindle
It’s time to rethink America’s retrograde love affair with trolley technology.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/27/the-streetcar-swindle
Do you read and post links to anything that does not involve funding from the Koch Brothers?