City Council’s SLUTty Daydreams

"Streetcars are nice; I like riding them. But we don't have a streetcar system, we have a bus system," said council member Tom Rasmussen, who wants SDOT to do a side-by-side cost comparison of adding electric buses on the proposed streetcar routes.

There was also a lot of talk about a "hierarchy of transit" and the attractiveness of a streetcar versus a bus. "It's easy to use. Riders won't have to look at a schedule," SDOT's Bill Bryant told council members, noting that the streetcars would run more frequently than buses, every six minutes through downtown. Underlying this "more attractive" notion is the idea that streetcars would appeal to those who currently don't ride the bus, though ridership numbers so far on the SLUT (the existing line from South Lake Union to Westlake Center) don't exactly bear that out. Plus, buses can look pretty too, argued Rasmussen: "We can get more attractive coaches. And we can run them at a higher frequency."

To this, transportation committee chair Jan Drago played the trump card: the streetcar system would be ours. "The difference is that the bus is totally controlled by King County Metro, which has the most political way of allocating bus service of anyplace in the U.S.," she reasoned. "The streetcar would be controlled by the city."

Drago made no attempt to mask her interest in pushing the idea forward. She's already calling for an August vote on the four proposed routes.