While Mayor Mike McGinn’s Walk Bike Ride Challenge should be lauded on principle, it ignores the general population who can’t easily participate.
McGinn’s challenge is to have residents walk or ride a bike or bus instead of taking a car. If participants report their efforts to the city, they will be automatically entered in a drawing to win prizes such as a $1,500 electric bike and an array of gift certificates. It’s a good example for our city leadership to set.
However, this isn’t practical for many Seattle residents, including families, those who work in another part of the city or elsewhere or workers whose jobs require more effective transportation.
For McGinn’s challenge to be more successful among these groups, the city and state need a better infrastructure to transport people from place to place in a reasonable amount of time. Right now, it is quicker to travel from one end of the city to the other by driving one’s car than it is to take public transportation — the most logical mode for a majority of the city’s residents, who have various errands to run, children to pick up and jobs far from where they live.
Sound Transit’s Link light rail is a good start, but it will take many more years before it can become the transportation system that is sorely needed in this region. In the meantime, Metro Transit is cutting its bus routes so that they do not overlap with light-rail service and, of course, to save money.
So while McGinn’s challenge awards those who can logistically participate, those who cannot — the majority of us — will be punished with more gridlock and less reliable infrastructure to get us where we need to go.
McGinn should focus less on promoting his pet cause of getting his constituents to be anti-car and concentrate more on how he and other government officials can effectively and reasonably get people moving in and through Seattle.[[In-content Ad]]
