I vote Monorail!

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Gary Reed
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jlt: Technically, if someone is required to do something, it isn’t a choice anymore. Reducing parking works if there are alternatives provided, rather than simply not including enough parking. Making the options more cost-effective means making them useful for things other than the arena.

I have a feeling that by cutting the parking, the above logic would be lost on most. It seems that the general public doesn’t view restriction as encouragement.

The only way to “encourage” alternate transportation is to make parking difficult and at the same time have other options available. Just making the options available by themselves will be a huge waste of resources, as other similar urban & suburban arena sitings have shown.

The idea is not to mitigate 100% of the traffic that an arena would generate–the idea is to provide enough options, and support those options, and make them practical for people to choose. The bad-news part of this is that traffic will get at least somewhat worse, and part of what encourages people to try other alternatives is bad traffic.

Frankly, the fact that they’re talking about a spur to move people from a godforsaken light rail station to a place where people actually congregate just continues to prove my point that Sac’s light rail planners weren’t playing with a full deck.

I also agree with jlt, a sports team does not a world class city make. I’d love for the Kings to stay, and I’m intrigued by the Cal Expo idea (no matter where they put a stadium, traffic will be an issue), but in the end, we can be a world class city without a team. Or we can talk about how much better it is to see a Rivercats game than any major league game.

Personally, I think we’d be much more of a ‘world class’ city if we just gave up this childish fantasy of a sports team and really tried to manage, contain and funnel growth and income into where it would benefit the city and county most.

Maybe we need to run streetcars down K Street through Midtown’s burgeoning nightclub district. We could call it the “Man-o-rail!”

Why?

Streetcar lines, like the ones in Portland (f’rinstance) cost one-third as much as light rail. They’re also far better at interacting with street traffic: streetcars are around 40 feet long and operate at traffic speeds, unlike light rail which is 80-320 feet long and can operate at up to freeway speeds. Unlike a monorail, which normally requires an elevated above-grade location, streetcars run on the street and can share the right of way with cars.

Think about it: You’re parked at Arden Fair Mall so you can get your latest goth supplies at Hot Topic. You decide you want to catch “Underworld 3″ but it’s playing down at Cinedomes instead of the Arden Fair theaters. Rather than get back in your car and drive over to the theater and re-park, you hop the streetcar on Arden and get off right as the streetcar turns around at Expo and Hurley near the domes. After the movie, you have a bad case of consumption and arsenic poisoning from all the white makeup you use because you’re a goth, so you hop back on the streetcar to Kaiser for a blood transfusion. Finally, you hop back on the streetcar to take you back to the Arden Fair parking lot area so you can drive your hearse back home.

The nice thing about a streetcar loop in that vicinity is that it turns existing destinations, both occasional ones like Cal Expo and regular ones like the mall, various shopping centers and Kaiser, from places normally not within easy walking distance of each other.

Centrage ain’t gonna happen.

For Sacramento, I vote to have the monorail named the Sacramento Area Monorail! SAM!

It runs from near the Space Needle to a downtown shopping mall. It might have been a stupid idea that somebody came up with to find a way to flush money down the toilet and to add a further space-age sheen to the heavily spaceneedle-ridden urban landscape, but it might also have just been a humble beginning point to a bigger project that might actually have some practical value.

I mean, it’s barely over a mile long, and goes from the Seattle Center (a clot of touristy stuff that locals go to when they first move here and try to forget) and a shopping mall. There are already bus routes (and pretty convenient ones, too) that run between the two destinations. The monorail here clearly is not for Seattle, it’s for people visiting Seattle. Honestly, I’m not sure if they even use it.

I will say that, overall, Seattle has far better public transportation than Sacramento. At least more extensive. But well, we’re already a world-class city, so we don’t need to prove anything. We had Frasier. Sac’s got nothin’.

I miss you guys, though.