Posted on 02/08/2003 1:46:34 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
This week in his State of the City address, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels called for a new streetcar that would run from Westlake Center through the South Lake Union neighborhood to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. And so, our nostalgia craze continues.
We've now built a waterfront trolley, started a Mosquito Fleet-style water taxi to West Seattle, dug up the Kalakala, we're expanding our 1962 monorail, and now a streetcar.
Oh, I'm sure it'll be a modern streetcar and all, but aren't we supposed to be riding personal jetpacks by now? Weren't there going to be giant conveyer belts and George Jetson bubble craft? A streetcar sounds so Rice-A-Roni, so Queen Anne Counterbalance, so Stella!!!
When I think streetcars, I think "Brother, can you spare a dime?" and so do City Council members. They're asking how we're going to spare the 450 million dimes it would take to build this one. Nickels says half the money would come from property owners who would benefit from the project. The idea is that some good transportation would help turn South Lake Union into a lucrative, biotech Belltown with condos, shops and offices. You might be asking, "Wouldn't a bus do that?" Well, the mayor addressed that indirectly. In his speech, which you can read at http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/mayor/speeches/stateofcity2003.htm, he said Seattle needs "transportation choices that are fast, convenient, flexible -- and yes, even fun." Everyone knows streetcars are more fun than buses because they're older.
When I was growing up in the suburbs, "old" was a bad thing. Old stuff was what you had if you couldn't afford new stuff. But today, from houses to furniture to record players, it's all about being "original" and "vintage." The Kingdome was modern in its day, but Safeco Field is better, and a lot more expensive, because it's made to seem antique. So if we were to build today the same kind of transportation device that we tore out 60 years ago, it would feel like we're really splurging. You know you're living well when you have a spanking new streetcar.
One of the reasons old things appeal to us so much is that they seem to come from a time when people were nicer and cleaner. Commuters who won't ride Metro buses because of smelly passengers might ride a streetcar, because they imagine that in the old days, trolleys were odorless. After trying the streetcar for a while, many of these commuters will remember that the real reason they don't ride the bus is that they're lazy and they don't like people, and they'll return to their cars. But the others will stay with the streetcar and learn to like it.
The streetcar is also getting a boost from Seattle's current wave of Portland-envy. Portland put in a streetcar before we did because they have to do everything first because they think they're so smart, and that move is widely credited with helping turn their Pearl District from a rail yard into Trendytown. Things seem to going Portland's way right now. The Oregonian has proclaimed it the new "in" spot for young people and quoted a local economist as saying, "When you're hot, you're hot." Oh yeah? Well, if you're so nifty, Portland, how come Paul Allen likes us better? How come all he's given you is Shawn Kemp, but for us he built an ug-, I mean, cool-looking museum and he wants to make South Lake Union the cutting edge, DNA-sequencing, cancer-curing neighborhood of the 21st century with a streetcar? Got something to say now? I didn't think so. Get a real mountain.
The problem is, we have a lot of other transportation needs in this town besides South Lake Union. Councilman Richard Conlin points out that "The International District has been asking for a streetcar for about a million years." And Nickels himself reminded us in his State of the City speech that we have to fix the Alaskan Way Viaduct because, "Gribbles nibble the support system for the seawall." Gribbles are small marine crustaceans of the wood louse family that burrow into submerged wooden structures, and right now they're eating the timbers that hold up our road. FYI, I did a computer search and no other State of the City addresses this year contained the phrase "gribbles nibble."
So can Nickels pull it off? Can he convince ordinary Seattleites to go along with his vision, despite shrinking budgets and nibbling gribbles? Well, it won't be easy, but then the mayah has always depended on the kindness . . . of strangahs.
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