Traffic in Seattle: rewarding non ownership of cars

Foreword

This is a short collection of some of my thoughts on traffic in Seattle. I am sorry that it is so Seattle-concentric but that is what I am familiar with; I trust that you can discard the parochial and see that these ideas are relevant to almost any American urban area's traffic problems.

There is no particular order to the postings. Most stand on their own and they would not all need to be enacted to make any one of the ideas work.

This is a work in progress. I will be posting more and (hopefully) adding pictures to illustrate what I am trying to impart.

But my basic idea can be summed up by stating that the notion that we need to build our way out of congestion won't work, that we need to reduce the reliance on the internal combustion engine and we need to fix what we have.

I am an advocate of monorail in many urban settings. They will not solve all of our problems--nothing will. But they could be a very attractive and useful addition to the urban solution. I have come to believe that very high speed Maglev holds great promise for intercity travel, between 200 and 500 miles.

In short, I believe that the answers are to be found in small changes, both hardware and software. Finally, I think that the politicians and even the traffic planners better hurry up and get out in front because the people themselves just might solve the problem on their own, if they aren't careful.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

rewarding non ownership of cars

Take a deep breath. Give people money for not owning a car. OK, that might be too much.

How about giving them a bus pass? Or at least a reduced price bus pass. Maybe some taxi script. Or even a coupon good for the first hundred bucks on a bike.

But let’s give something to those that take a car off the road by not owning a car.

Traffic in Seattle

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Tuesday, October 2, 2007

rewarding non ownership of cars

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