Money better used for other options

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, December 27, 2003

Sound Transit just spent $385 million to turn a 50-minute average commute on a bus into an hour-long train ride. I spent eight years commuting to downtown Seattle from Everett and my wife still commutes daily into downtown Seattle. She is in her 15th year of commuting to Seattle. We both found that the Mariner Park &Ride was the best option for commuting from our house near Madison Elementary.

A typical daily commute from that Park &Ride to and from Seattle takes about 50 minutes. The advantage of the bus is that it takes you into downtown Seattle. The Sounder drops riders south of the downtown area, and most riders will have to transfer to a metro bus to get to their final destination. Consequently, the trip to Seattle will take the average commuter longer than the advertised one hour to get to their workplace aboard the Sounder.

I worked at two downtown locations during my eight years of commuting and the bus always dropped me off and picked me up within two blocks of work. My wife works at the north end of the downtown district and would have to find a bus to take her back uptown from the King Street Station if she took the Sounder. The train station is slightly closer to our home than the Park &Ride lot, but on Sounder it would take my wife an hour and 20 minutes to get to the same spot that the bus gets her to in 50 minutes. This is not exactly the improvement we had expected for $385 million.

The most significant improvement in the commute during our commuting tenure was the completion of the HOV lanes from the county line up to the Everett area. Sound Transit really should have spent the $385 million on completing all of the needed improvements to the bus transit system and carpool lanes instead of on a slow train to Seattle.

Everett