Bill Hirt’s letter “Light Rail Wrong for Bellevue” (Reporter, Feb. 7) is simply more of the same myopic naysaying about rail transit on the Eastside that we’ve been hearing, and finally have overcome, for the last 12 years from Kemper Freeman, Jim Horn, Bruce Nurse, and their Eastside Transportation Association cohorts.
They, and now Hirt, keep banging the drums for ever more bus service across Lake Washington, and ever more roads, too, making the case that bus rapid transit is far superior to rail transit, cheaper and capable of more carrying capacity. Nary a mention of the fact that, except for crossing the I-90 bridge while preempting the HOV lanes now reserved for cars, buses like cars face crippling traffic congestion everywhere.
Yes, rail transit is costly to build, but so is any major infrastructure project. If necessary dedicated special lanes were built for buses in Seattle and Bellevue, they would require far more right of way width than for rail. Freeing up that amount of real estate is simply not in the cards for either city. And buses also pollute, are dependent on fossil fuel, and are noisier than rail transit, which in fact is remarkably quiet even on the surface. And rail is not curtailed by snow storms as Metro Transit buses to Bellevue were in December.
Hirt claims that rail would not offer enough trains to the Eastside to “justify any route” here. Sound Transit has studied to death this question and the ability of the I-90 bridge to support frequent crossings, and, according to the Feb. 7 Reporter, Bellevue’s Chamber of Commerce and its Downtown Association agree, as does Bellevue’s City Council.
It’s as if our parochial rail naysayers are hell bent on repeating the horrendous mistake made by regional voters 35 years ago in repeatedly turning down a 90 percent federally funded rail mass transit system which, had it been built, would today rival the world-class systems in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., and now Denver, along with countless systems in Europe (where I’ve lived for more than 12 years) and Asia.
D.O. Claussen
