Elf Sternberg

It could be serendipity, or it could be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but the issue of mass transit has come across my radar three times in the past two days. The biggest, of course, is Motherboard's article The Immoble Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse. The second is a case of serious pushback from conservative forces in the greater Seattle metropolitan area against a proposed collection of tax increases that would allow our highly successful light rail system to extend from a basic downtown-to-the-airport route to a full mass-transit system linking all of Seattle's major districts and burbs. And the third was an article (which I can't now find, dammit) about Wisconsin's urban/rural divide, and how it's now gotten to the point where the rural legislators view their urban counterparts not only as illegitimate, but actually dangerous to the culture, morals, and financial well-being of the rest of the state.

I can't talk to the financial status of Milwaukee or Wisconsin, but I do know a little about my own home state, and the greater metropolitan region known as the Puget Sound, which includes the cities of Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett in a three-county mass-transit administrative region. My wife is a politician, and I frequently find myself in a room with congressmen, senators, and state legislators. At one event last year, I asked a former state legislator about Seattle's mass-transit battles, and she laid it out clearly.

The Puget Sound Management Region has several different mass-transit authorities, including King County Metro, Snohomish County Community Transit, Pierce County Transit, and Sound Transit. Sound Transit has a mixed allocation scheme in that it has the authority to raise money in the three counties in which it operates; it's job is to get people moving between the major cities. But the other three (King Metro, Snohomish, and Pierce), which are each centered on an anchor city, are funded strictly by a state-level allocation, and there are laws on the books that prevent counties from funding their own transit systems.

The reason for this, my legislator avowed, is because it lets the rural districts "keep Seattle on a leash." Seattle is a net-positive-revenue region: we generate more money for the state coffers than we cost the state to administer. Far-flung rural counties with good roads and clean water have Seattle to thank for making up the annual revenue shortfalls that would allow those facilities to fall into disrepair. The rural districts see this as a dangerous state of affairs, in that it gives Seattle a significant amount of moral capital and financial power in the legislature.

But legislatural seats are allocated not only on population, but on a mix of population density and territory size; as such, rural districts often have a majority number of votes in the state legislature compared to urban districts. Rural districts are deeply suspicious of urban districts, with their multi-colored, multi-cultural take on things, their embrace of many different ways to live, their ability to give people niches small enough to hide in and big enough to live in. "Urban" is a code for non-Christian, non-straight, non-white. Those people can't be allowed to have too much power. They can't even be allowed to have more power.

How do you remind a city that it's the rural districts' servant, and not their master?

If you cut off a city's water supply, people die. If you cut off electricity, people die. Cut off garbage, people get sick and die. But if you cut off mass-transit: "Eh." People will get around by cars. Traffic will be horrible, but so what? You live in the city, you get what's coming to you. The goal of legislative control of city mass transit is to provide just enough so that cleaners, cooks, clerks, delivery people, and so on can barely make it to their jobs, and to remind the city on an annual basis that the basic labor infrastructure of the city could be snarled and wrecked at the whim of the legislature. A transit budget battle doesn't sound like a life-or-death issue, so it can be sold as "just another budget issue."

When you hear about a transit budget battle and the region is a net-positive-revenue source for the state, consider what's really going on behind the scenes: rural districts are trying to figure out how much they can tighten the leash on their urban population before their annual budget starts to suffer.

Since school is almost here, Omaha and I took Kouryou-chan to Wild Waves for one last summer experience last week.

Unfortunately, the day didn't start out well. After planning for almost two weeks what day I could take off, and busting our butts to make sure we were completely caught up professionally before deciding to run out on our jobs and play hooky for the day, Kouryou-chan announced she didn't want to go. After trying to reason with her, Omaha gave up and went downstairs to the office to get work done after all.

I'm afraid that I went into full-on Dad mode and laid it down for Kouryou-chan. What she had done was rude, because she knew what the plan was, and deciding the day-of that she didn't want to go without her sister or other peers was rude to her family, who had planned this so we could go as a family together. She was going to go down and apologize to her mother, and if she sounded contrite enough, we might go.

We went.

We had a good time. I can't tell if it's that my daughters are approaching their jailbait years, or if I'm already closing in on senescence, but jailbait just doesn't appeal to me all that much. I can't perv out anymore.

We brought lunch and ate out in our cars. Kouryou-chan's first ride was the big roller coaster at the far end of the park, followed by the log flume. We spent a lot of time in the wave pool, but Omaha and I wanted to do the slides, so there was a lot of waiting in line. Yeah, we even went into the giant toilet bowl Riptide, which always reminds me of a certain Dr. Fun cartoon

Sunburned, waterlogged, and tired, we went out to a restaurant for dinner, and fell into bed around 10, pausing only long enough to wash the chlorine out of hair and skin.

In case you don't want to click on the photo, this drivers has taped a 5x8 index card to the back of every headrest, and to the dashboard in front of the passenger's seat, saying:

• Wear your seatbelt if under 27
• Don't comment on my driving
• Don't comment on the smell, except for Forest
• Don't distract me

Now that's the ultimate in Seattle passive-aggressive treatment of friends and family.

I have to wonder about the age restriction. And what does he mean by "Forest," capital and all?

I'm not sure who's playing on KUOW right now, but I was listening to a woman talk about how her ability to read other women was terrible. I think I heard her use the word "semiotic" in a sentence. But whatever else she said, her comment about reading women in Seattle was spot on:

I was in Seattle recently and I saw all these hard-looking women hanging out in cafes, and they had half-shaved heads and lots of peircings and nose rings and stretched ear lobes, and I turned to my friend and said, "Wow, there are all these comely lesbians in Seattle."

My friend snorted and said, "Those aren't lesbians. Those are women who were forced to become men because the men won't."

Yeeeowch.

Omaha, Kouryou-chan, Lisakit and I all trooped down to the Des Moines marina, the suburb just south of Burien, where some of the comfortably wealthy of Seattle keep their boats and put on a little show for the plebians annually. I'm only slightly kidding.

We arrived a little later than we'd planned, and the little park was already filling up when I dropped off my passengers. I had to park blocks away, and walk back.

The population was a mixture of middle class, with some uncolleged twenty-somethings lying on a blanket in front of us, the women chain smoking and showing off their tattoos.

I walked down to the waterfront to find vendors selling soda pop, normally $0.75, for $2.25 a can, and others selling bags of sugared popcorn for $5. Cops were everywhere, and security officers at the gate checked everyone who had a bag in case they were carrying their own explosives, or worse. I had a windbreaker with which I could have carried in several pounds and nobody would have been the wiser.

The fireworks themselves were lovely, but it's hard to dislike fireworks. They boomed and banged. The chemistry and physics are getting better; there were many geometrical shapes this year, lots of flat-plane explosions, and the colors were more crisp and precise than in former years. Americans like fireworks because they represent the potential to blow stuff up.

I forget just how Christian this part of King County is sometimes. When the fireworks ended, a group erupted in a "spontaneous" breakout of, not the national anthem, but "God Bless America," a fairly sectarian song that the Christianists have for years been trying to subsitute (and ultimately replace) the anthem.

The drive home was brutal. Des Moines just isn't built for a mass exodus, and it took 35 minutes to get five blocks.

When we got home, as promised, we let Kouryou-chan light off a few sparklers. She enjoyed them, bright and dangerous as they were, and then it was time for bed.

I always giggle every time I walk past the Hard Rock Cafe's new location in downtown Seattle. This is its second home; it's first used to be closer to the financial district, but far from the tourist zone. From the new locale the iconic Pike Place Market sign can be seen, and it's right between two major tourist destinations.

That said, I giggle because it now occupies what was, for all of the 90s and much of the 00s, the most downtrodden pawn shop in the city, above which was unquestionably Seattle's sleaziest adult magazine, toy and video store. From the big open pit design which allowed the proprietor to watch every browser who might want to lift a copy of Aunt Peg's Photoshoot or a Doc Johnson Butt Plug, to the scary back booths with loose latches where, if you listened, you could hear men willfully violating the "one occupant per booth" rule as a video played to them on a cheap looping analog player.

Compared to that, the Hard Rock Cafe is pretty limp.

That said, at night, walking past, the broad alleyway separating the Cafe from the Starbucks next to it still reeks of overcooked hot dogs, steam, and stale urine.

That's Seattle for ya.

You're in Seattle. A man working at a 7-11 is wearing a turban. He is most likely:

(A) A Muslim
(B) A Hipster
(C) A Sikh

If you answered C, a Sikh, you were correct! Wikipedia says:

According to Article I of the "Rehat Maryada" (the Sikh code of conduct and conventions), a Sikh is defined as "any human being who faithfully believes in One Immortal Being; ten Gurus, from Guru Nanak Dev to Sri Guru Gobind Singh; the Sri Guru Granth Sahib; the teachings of the ten Gurus and the baptism bequeathed by the tenth Guru; and who does not owe allegiance to any other religion". Sikhs believe in the Equality of Mankind, the concept of Universal brotherhood of Man and One Supreme God (Ik Onkar).

And now you know more than Brock Stainbrook, who yesterday assaulted a man wearing a turban at a 7-11. He seems to have a problem with anger management, according to the indictment, and our inciteful elites gave him an excuse to pop off. Apparently, he was so convinced of the rightness of his actions that he didn't think he'd be arrested when the cops asked him about it.

The first day of our staycation, necessitated by my injured leg, involved hitting the Seattle Aquarium. If we're stuck anywhere without much walking, doing the touristy things with the kids is definitely the way to go.

Our visit started with a nasty surprise: a dead cocker spaniel floating in the water under the aquarium. (We later confirmed with one of the staff that that's what it was.) Once inside, though it was a much cleaner world. Inside the foyer is a huge plexiglassed-in aquarium and through it we watched a diver feed the fish and anemones while she talked to the kids about what she was doing.

Further inside there was the tidepool area, where the kids entertained themselves touching the starfish and other tidepool life the aquarium had determined was safe to touch, plus a large octopus and other miscellany. We walked among the "weird fish" exhibit and the tidal reef exhibits, and learned that one of the staff at the Seattle Aquarium is the "official studbook keeper for the seahorse," which doesn't sound like a very effective pick-up line, if you ask me.

We went to lunch at a fast-food joint further down the waterfront from the aquarium, then headed back for the afternoon shows. We sat in the underwater dome (which at its top is less than a foot underwater, but it's still a cool feat of engineering) and watched another feeding. I watched a starfish eat, that was pretty cool. Then we went to the mammals section, saw the otters and the seals and the sea lions. There was a demonstration with the seals about feeding them and habituating them to medical attention.

I had a chance to speak with three of the biologists on staff at different occasions. All of them said we ought to be very worried about the acidification of the oceans and the loss of phytoplankton on the surface. As in no-shit-the-70's-ecodisaster-folks-were-right worried.

But there was very little of that visible within the aquarium. It was all very much a happy place, with the only concerns being minimized throughout the exhibits. It was one of the things that annoyed me the most: there wasn't much of an attempt to educate the audience, just entertain. Look at the octopus, isn't he big? Look at the otter, isn't he cute? There were a few child-friendly "You can help save the watersheds!" scattered here and there, but right outside, under the pier, you could see a vast wasteland of plastic and waste wood that belied the cheerful reticence of the aquarium to be a bummer. The cynic in me says that the board, made up as it is of people from Boeing, Microsoft, and other corporate interests, don't want to alarm the people too much. Omaha says I'm too cynical: it's just that they believe the audience doesn't care.

They're probably right. And they won't care until soylent green is people.

Just to give you a feel for the scale of the fountain at the center of Seattle Center, here's a pretty good pano of the Fountain and Kouryou-chan, weilding an umbrella against the constantly shifting patterns of water and mist that erupt out of the steel Mario-brothers mushroom.

Gods, this pisses me off.

A couple of weeks ago, after getting off at the suburban train station in Tukwila, I had a run-in with a transit cop who told me that the stairwells were for emergency use only. They aren't marked as such in any way; the only thing they have next to them is an advisory sign instructing those too ill or handicapped to use the stairs to wait at the "Area of Refuge." Above the one-way doors leading from the train platform to the stairwells is a green EXIT sign.

The cop insisted that the "Area of Refuge" signs are indicators that one is supposed to use the stairwells for emergencies only. I told him I doubted that and I would check with Metro's own policy regarding the issue.

I haven't done that yet. Too busy/too lazy/too hassled, but I have been a good little Elf and have taken the escalators down whenever I've been walking. Sometimes I take my bicycle, though, and that leads to today's incident.

My commute is very Seattle. Usually, I drive to the light rail station, ride into downtown, and then ride my bicycle across town to wherever I'm going. This afternoon, doing this in reverse, as I got off the train, I very responsibly walked my bicycle all the way down the long platform to the end where the elevator waits.

As I walked my bicycle off the elevator, a woman in the Sound Transit livery walked up to me and said, "Excuse me sir. We don't know when a handicapped person is going to want to use the elevator. In the future, could you please use the stairs?"

I swallowed my reaction, nodded mutely, and walked off.

Sound Transit needs to train its people better. If the elevators are for the handicapped only-- and bicyclists, who are already forbidden by law from using the escalator must carry their bicycles up and down two flights of stairs, and what if I drop the damn thing?-- there ought to be signs indicating so. If the staircases are for emergency use only, there ought to be signs indicating so.

I sent my complaint to Sound Transit. Their complaint form is obviously for the illiterate: it swallows line breaks, turns your entire letter into one enormous paragraph (well, okay, my entire letter, but I'm voluminously verbose), and forbids HTML.

If Sound Transit really wants to discourage ridership, having incompetent people all along the journey is one sure way to do it.