Welcome to Public Transit: Hurry Up and Wait (Pt 1)

Part 1

When I first moved to Seattle from my hometown, it took me two years before I gave into riding the Metro.

The day that I turned sixteen I swore off all forms of public transportation in favor of the freedom of driving my own motor vehicle. Where I lived this was not an issue: gas was cheap, SUVs were plentiful and there was parking as far as the eye could see. These were glorious days. When I arrived at the University of Washington I soon learned that finding free parking was impossible, parallel parking an oversized vehicle was out of the question and the high cost of living made petroleum far out of the reach of a starving college student; throw in the mix a few hundred dollars in parking violations and soon my days of reckless automotion were numbered.

For those unaware of King County's Metro Transit System, it is one the most effective ways of transporting people in and out of Seattle and the surrounding areas. Having said that, transportation in Western Washington's dense urban areas and between them is a joke. Interstate 5 is the primary means of getting people from place to place, especially commuters on weekday mornings and evenings. Every day rush hour traffic is completely clogged and congested on a level par with cities exponentially larger than ours like Los Angeles and New York. The problem? Though I-5 was ahead of its time when it was built in the 1960's, the population explosion of the Puget Sound area in recent decades has made it now a relic of the past. This has pushed our interstate to the limits of its capacity, with no complementary mode of transportation to accommodate its overflow. Though shrewd local leaders and active citizens have helped initiate audacious attempts to get people moving again (like Sound Transit's Light Rail project and the expansion of the Monorail), they have both had to struggle with financial hurdles and fiery criticism.

Where does this leave a hopeless pedestrian like myself? Forced to get uncomfortably familiar with the newest emerging class in Western Washington: the hapless public transit rider. Cutting across all classes, races and sexes these people defy definition. They have the same common goals: getting to their destination quickly and reliably, not paying for parking and often not paying for transportation at all. As much as the Metro is an egalitarian method of transportation, its rider demographic varies wildly depending on the time of day, day of the week and location of the bus route. Case in point: boarding in the outermost parts of the city in the early hours of a week day morning, you are likely to have your shoulder drooled on by a slumbering professional, wearing a shitty Jerry Garcia necktie, on his way downtown for his first fair-trade latte of the day. Six hours later and one stop into the ride free area you are likely to have your shoulder drooled on by an exhausted homeless man, reaking of fortified wine and GPC cigarettes, on his way into and out of the city several times looking for a few peaceful minutes of shut-eye.

For most of us, we'd rather be traveling to our destinations by almost any other means. Whether it be our car, our bike or our own two feet, taking the bus means robbing ourselves of a little bit of our constitutionally guaranteed individualism. Until parking and gas gets cheaper or people stop kicking us when we're sleeping on the sidewalk, we're stuck together. But as you the reader will soon find out, life on the Metro is often less than peaceful.