Yesterday, on Apr 16th, we had a wonderful experience with the Light Rail system in Tacoma. I would love for such experience to be more common in Bellevue, WA.
I visited Tacoma to have my son attend the Washington State Chess tournament held at the Convention Center.. We were asked to park near the Tacoma dome station and take the light rail using Light Rail link. At first I was skeptical and was considering to go park near tournament site. Having been offered free parking and free ride on a Saturday, I decided to try it.
There was ample parking at the dome station. Being Saturday, we got free parking. And it was super convenient to get into the light rail which was clean and comfortable. The ride was about 5 minutes or so to get to the door steps of the convention center. My 6 year old son enjoyed the ride as well. The light rail easily took about 100+ folks in a single ride. Our return trip was equally convenient. We got to observe the landmarks in the Tacoma visitor zone – Tacoma Arts Museum, Glass Museum, History Museum, etc. Without having to worry about feeding the parking meters, I was able to enjoy the time. Many little kids who took the ride also enjoyed it. One thing for sure, I was not buying a lot of items to carry back … because without a car to load, I did not want to load myself up. I did eat at restaurants and enjoyed the experiential things. In this day and age of buying from online stores, perhaps that is less of an issue.
On returning home, I read about the debate about different mobility options for our growing Bellevue city. There is a camp arguing for public transit and another camp arguing for better roads for cars. I am not sure about the tipping point for cars vs. public transit. With a population of nearly 500,000 folks in the Eastside and about 100,000 in Bellevue alone, I wonder if we are at the tipping point. Any mass transit takes time to build, operate, and grow the rider share. And these are very helpful during the peak hours. Besides perhaps reducing the car traffic, mass transit can help create better walkways encouraging folks to walk. Increasingly with paid parking in Bellevue downtown, it is desirable to have a better public transit system in place. Or who knows we may have super efficient personal hover-boards in the future. And perhaps personal vehicles can be used in conjunction with the mass transit.
I look forward to the arrival of bike lanes and perhaps light rail options on the new SR 520 bridge. And certainly there will be more debates and decisions to be made.
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