I read on Heraldnet.com that the I-5 and I-405 commutes to Seattle and Bellevue have become untenable: More than an hour and a half for one and over an hour for the other. That means for an eight-hour workday in Seattle, our poor Snohomish County resident will spend three hours commuting. Three hours!
Let’s see: An hour and a half in the car or bus, another fifteen minutes walking from the parking lot or bus stop, then eight hours on the job, another fifteen minutes back to the parking lot or bus stop and the final hour and a half back home. That’s eleven and a half hours altogether. To get to work by eight, our intrepid Snohomish resident will have to be out of the house by 6:30 a.m., and won’t get back home until after dinner. Taking another eight hours for a good night’s sleep, our Snohomish County commuter has four and a half hours a day to do all the other things that make life interesting. There goes the old work/life balance.
If we in Snohomish County continue buying the same old snake oil about “growth” it’ll only get worse. We’ll find that the commute from, say, Marysville to Everett will become untenable too, as people crawl and creep down I-5 and across the trestle not only to reach Everett, but to hook up with I-5 for their commutes south to Bellevue or Seattle.
Drive along 180th from Highway 572 in Mill Creek to Highway 9 in Maltby and you’ll see the problem: Houses without counting being built on the speculation they’ll all be sold, and sold quickly. When these houses — and hundreds of people in them — become fact, commutes and general drive-times will be so bad we’ll start barking at the moon.
This is because Snohomish County is overbuilt. Snohomish County has become, in the words of the late Jim O’Hara, a “mess.” By that, Jim meant, “two pounds of doo-doo in a one-pound bag.”
Who’s responsible for this mess? None other than our county council. They, like almost all elected representatives come into office with the intention of keeping Snohomish County a nice place. Unhappily, once in office, they get bitten by the tsetse fly and their brains go to sleep. In their semi-conscious state, they are easy pickings for anyone with the time and money to camp on their doorsteps, i.e., carpetbaggers, land speculators and the Master Builders.
With the election past, if you value your way of life, here’s hoping we chose carefully; the next Snohomish County Council will either preserve your way of life, or end it for good and all.
Tom LaBelle is a resident of Clearview.
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