You have nothing to lose but your delays.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

One of my former bosses doesn’t like County Exec Ron Sims’s plan to stick more Metro buses on the streets, without expanding rail transit beyond Sound Transit’s already-under-construction single route.

The ex-boss has one salient point: Buses have a deserved rep for being infrequent and bogged down by car traffic, and an undeserved (in my opinion, not my ex-boss’s) rep for uncleanliness and discomfort. (Sound Transit’s suburban commuter coaches are particularly plush these days.)

But he’s wrong about calling buses “the public transportation option favored by people who do not take public transportation.” There’s nothing the local political caste likes more than a big construction project, such as light rail or the Lake Union streetcar.

But political turf-staking’s also at stake here. Metro’s now a county agency. Sound Transit is a tri-county joint venture. The already-missed Seattle Monorail Project was an independent agency which no politician controlled (and most every politician wanted to kill from the start).

Sims is proposing a transit scheme that could be created and maintained within the current county bureaucracy and taxing authority, rather than those of Sound Transit.

…list-O-linx today, shall we? We shall:

• In the news today, the art deco ferry Kalakala finally gets a piece of good news, in the form of official historic status…. Mayor Nickels’s plan for a Boston-like strip-club zone in the Industrial District moves forward, despite the need to preserve the area for industrial employment…. The Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will indeed move to the Seattle Center Snoqualmie Room after all, but not until this fall….
• Christopher Frizzelle’s Stranger essay on the doomed-for-development, 100-year-old building housing Seattle’s most hardcore gay bathhouse is notable for several reasons. Chief among them: The research Frizzelle put into the story, giving a sense of history and continuity to a place known for the most fleeting and anonymous of social encounters.
• Virginia Belle asks Democrats to stand up and take pride in themselves for once.
• I’d already been reading online about the amazing bus-only transit system of Curitiba, Brazil, when Jaime Lerner, the architect and ex-mayor who masterminded the thing, came to Seattle to promote his lessons learned. The Curitiba system can basically be described as like a light rail system, only it uses buses on bus-only road lanes instead of trains on tracks. Seattle already has one “busway,” down the industrial district south of the now-shuttered transit tunnel. Future busways could take the place of the now-aborted monorail project, across from the south end of the existing busway into West Seattle, and up through Elliott Avenue/15th Avenue West into Ballard. Bus-only lanes could be added beside, above, or beneath current streets/bridges, or (even cheaper) rededicated from current auto use. Worth thinking about, at least.
• Remember what I said last week about the ’06 Mariners looking pretty good? Strike that; reverse it.

• Smoking in bars and restaurants officially ends on Dec. 8. There should be some kind of ceremony. Perhaps a ritual lowering of the giant Camel billboards inside the Showbox, or a ceremonial giveaway of the last Lucky Strike bar ashtrays.
• The gas-tax repeal is apparently going down. In double-negative terms, that means the higher gas tax is still on. The viaduct replacement project is still on, as are assorted commuter highway projects. The Republican-leaning rural voters of Eastern Washington, who imagine themselves to be self-reliant but traditionally get more out of gas-tax funds than they pay in, voted for the repeal (i.e., against the tax).
• The city and county political establishments, with little organized opposition, easily remained intact, with incumbents winning the races for mayor, county exec, and city council.
• And, oh yeah, the monorail finally lost on the fifth vote. This means the four previous votes, and the millions already spent on engineering, design, and real estate, may be for naught. It’s a “victory” of sorts for the municipal establishment, which never liked this populist interloper messing up its carefully planned system of projects. All along, the monorail threatened to takeup taxing and bonding capacity the politicians would rather put to use on their own pet projects.What I’d like to see now: The city should sell or donate the monorail project’s assembled real estate and R&D documents to either King County or Sound Transit, with the proviso that they be used to build a public transit system on the two legs of the monorail route (Ballard to downtown, downtown to West Seattle). This re-christened system need not use monorail technology or elevated tracks. It could involve retro trolleys, modern streetcars, light rail, or even buses on bus-only street lanes. Just as long as it’s something other than expecting everyone to own a private car.
• Back East, meanwhile, Democrats won big in Virginia and New Jersey. But in NYC, that supposed liberal hotbed to top all liberal hotbeds, the Republican mayor won an easy re-election with hardly a peep of opposition.

No, I don’t know why this site was down earlier today. But it seems to be working now.

And I’ll have something to say about the latest attempt to kill the Seattle Monorail Project once the dust has cleared. Once again, nobody likes the Monorail except the people.

…but I’m glad somebody listed how (and why) to “Save Your Seattle Monorail.”

The local mainstream media’s monorail bashers remain vigilant, ever on the lookout for any potential for negative spin. One recent case in point: SeaTimes columnist Danny Westneat, who ponders whether the most recently-released designs for the elevated rail lines look too much like “another Kingdome.”

If they do, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

The Kingdome was a marvel of engineering, and was built in budget and almost on time. It was designed before the era of nonstop cable sports coverage, luxury boxes, and retractable-roof technology; so it was designed to maximize what was baseball’s principle revenue stream at the time, regular ticket sales, by preventing rainouts in the most cost-effective way–a permanent roof. Aside from the ceiling-tile fiasco and early field-lighting issues, it served its purpose well, until the time came to progress beyond it.

So will the monorail.

…of public transportation, I luuv anything that helps trip planning. Such an aid has been provided by a dedicated volunteer project, the “Seattle Bus Monster.” Clickable, zoomable maps of the Seattle metro area not only show you the bus routes but their stops, and how soon the next bus is supposed to get to that stop (presuming everything’s on schedule). The site also offers still images from the WSDOT traffic cams, updated every five minutes. The Bus Monster is a self-updating database, seamlessly combining info from Google Maps, King County, the state Department of Transportation, and the UW’s Intelligent Transportation Systems project. Great job.

Remember: Monorail vote #4 is one of those “no-means-yes” dealies.

…dammit, so I still want to see in real life some of the proposals depicted at Transportation Futuristics. Yes, that includes the Monorail.

The Amtrak Cascades to Porltand left Friday morning at a challengingly-early 7:30 a.m. My traveling companion and I had been up two hours prior, so some napping was done by each of us on the soothing, scenic 3.5-hour ride.

I can’t think of many reasons to go enter the Beaver State through any means other than the train. Instead of strip malls and off ramps, you get to see farmlands, forests, Puget Sound, the Tacoma Narrows (above), the Columbia River, the giant egg statue at the town of Winlock, WA, and much more; and all the while you get to eat, drink, read, work, and/or watch an in-train movie. (The one this time was A Guy Thing, another of those horridly average sitcom movies set in Seattle but filmed in Vancouver.)

The economy in ol’ Rip City is as bad as it is here, or worse, and has been bad longer than it’s been bad here. The papers are full of dire warnings about yet another state government cutbacks. There’s an initiative campaign to raise a local income tax (on top of the state income tax) to keep the public schools open.

Yet some big-thinking local folks are trying to attract baseball’s athletically competitive but fiscally hapless Montreal Expos to Portland, a venture which would bring in tourist bucks but would probably require a publicly-subsidized stadium. I myself would love a National League team in the Northwest, if only as an excuse to go south more often.

We’ve previosly mentioned how most of Portland’s compact downtown has been preserved in its seedy yet funky glory. The new depression has kept rents low for the vintage stores, indie book and music shops, coffeehouses, and brewpubs.

And between the two MAX light-rail routes and a shorter downtown loop train, you won’t miss not having brought a car.

…”Seattle totally sucks, man” whining came today in the unexpected spot of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine section.

Writer William Dietrich compared Seattle’s downtown to that of Portland and Vancouver BC. He gave our town last-place marks in everything from public transit to residential development. He blamed Seattle’s perceived failings on a lack of a strong, paternalistic planning bureaucracy capable of deciding what’s best for everybody and acting freely on its decisions.

Reality check time.

Yeah, we’re over a decade late with starting a big multi-county transit scheme; but the Times doesn’t particularly love the one we’ve now got (Sound Transit) and opposed the grassroots alternative to it (the Monorail initiatives).

We’ve had bureaucrats with big designs for how we were supposed to all want to live. They gave us the “urban village” and Seattle Commons schemes, which many citizens denounced as giveaways to private developers. (Oh yeah: Dietrich’s story highly approves of government givewaways to private developers. He praises Vancouver’s heritage of politicians who’ve been exclusively devoted to such giveaways.) So now we’ve got unofficially planned zoning schemes to promote luxury condos on every block that isn’t reserved for single-family homes (i.e., any block where the non-affluent might currently live).

What Vancouver really has, besides the land giveaways and the SkyTrain: A downtown constrained to a two-square-mile isthmus, surrounded by a city equally water-confined, discouraging highways and sprawl. It also has a Canadian political system in which the “highway lobby” has traditionally had less clout.

What Portland really has, besides the light rail: A flatter central downtown with smaller blocks and no alleys, encouraging more foot traffic and tying the “hip” areas (Burnside and the Pearl District) closer to downtown than our Capitol Hill and Queen Anne are to our central business district. This lack of topological barriers between the business district and residential districts is the chief reason why Portland has a downtown high school and supermarket and we don’t. (Of course, it didn’t help that Seattle closed Queen Anne High in the ’70s.)

Seattle’s transportation and sprawl problems haven’t been solved, and probably can’t be solved, by professional bureaucrats acting by fiat. It’s the bureaucrats we’ve got who’ve made such a mess of Sound Transit, led the fight against the Monorail, and helped promote sprawl. (Remember that failed state transportation referendum last November, that would’ve given trickles of cash to transit and gushes of cash to more suburban highways?)

Dietrich, and the Times, want a Seattle with more potentials for insider dealmaking and fewer democratic checks and balances. I want better. So, I’m certain, do most area residents. And that doesn’t suck at all.

…a hopeful mood and awful music.

This morning I experienced a lousy mood and terrific music.

I deliberately stayed away from election-nite coverage, instead watching the surprisingly good Sonics win their fourth straight basketball game. Then I stopped by the new Carpenters’ Hall in Belltown. (The old hall had been razed several years ago for a high-rise condo, incorporating the smaller new union hall.) There, the monorail campaigners held their party. The aforementioned awful music was provided by a lowest-common-denominator “blooze” band, churning out tedious arrangements of the tritest ’60s-nostalgia hits.

(Memo to all campaign organizers: Progressive politics isn’t just for Big Chillers anymore.)

But aside from that, it was a triumphal evening. Asking taxpayers to make a major investment during tuff economic times is always a challenge. (Note the inglorious defeat of the statewide highway levy.) But despite that, and despite the powers-that-be’s smear and scare campaigns, the monorail referendum achieved a solid lead in the polls, pending the late absentees. The city came together to create a better future for itself, in the form of a tourist-friendly commuter system (or a commuter-friendly tourist attraction).

Then in the morning came the horrible news. The GOP goon squad held onto the U.S. House and had regained at least a tie in the Senate. This means the Consitution-busters, the domestic enemies of freedom, have a rubber-stamp Congress to pass any roughshod legislation, appoint any crook, and give away the whole country to the billionaires.

Of course, the Democrats hadn’t provided much of a hindrance to these schemes anyway. Maybe this second-straight electoral debacle will, once and for all, finally discredit the Democratic Leadership Council and its Right Lite policy of subjugation.

The terrific music that cheered me up today came from the previously discredited Trio cable channel. This morning it showed one of the hundreds of British music shows in its library. This particular hour compiled old performance footage by scads of early punk legends (Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam, Iggy, Siouxsie, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Undertones). It all cheered me up immensely.

You have every right to ask why I’d frown at 1967 nostalgia music but grin at 1977 nostalgia music. Well, there’s a reason. The band at the monorail party interpreted old Beatles and Stones numbers into slowed-down, dumbed-down exercises in collective self-congratulation. The live performances in the punk documentary were brisk, brash statements of mass resistance. The Thatcher and Reagan regimes (like the Bush regime today, only slightly less stupidly) were on jugggernauts to redistribute wealth upward, to spread war and poverty, to make the world safe for corporate graft. Punk rock, at its best, was one big loud defiant NO! to the whole reactionary worldview.

(Progressive politics isn’t just for slam-dancers anymore either. But punk’s classic note of rejecting the given situation, and creating/demanding a more human-scale world, is something we could all use a lot more of now.)

The Seattle monorail referendum is the only major issue on this year’s mid-term local ballot. (There’s also a statewide highway levy, and the ritual re-elections of unopposed congresspeople and state legislators. But the monorail’s the one ballot item assured to change the region’s future.)

Since the movement’s start in 1996 by ex-cabdriver Dick Falkenbury, through two initiatives (the second was to repeal the city council’s actions to kill the project), and now on to the vote to actually build a 14-mile phase-one line, the monorail’s been loved by almost everybody except the big guys.

Thus, the three-month barrage of questionable “facts,” innuendo, and outright smear tactics by assorted political and business “leaders,” whose chief spokesman is a former scandal-plagued port commissioner.

The shallowness and shrillness of the anti-monorail drive has only helped confirm my suspicions that this isn’t just a vote on building an in-city transit system. It’s also being treated by many as a referendum on the “Seattle Process” political machine itself. This machine believes it has the sole right to paternistically decide what’s best for the citizenry (which usually means whatever the Nordstroms and Paul Allen want). The machine’s m.o. is all about the deserved primacy of “experts,” planners, and authorities. It can’t stand the threat of actual citizen-driven democracy.

Seattle needs an economical, efficient, out-of-car-traffic transit system designed just for in-town everyday movement (as opposed to suburban commutes). The process machine needs a comeuppance. There are other reasons for Seattle residents to vote for the monorail, but these two are the most important.