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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Metro/ST isn't that bad, I take it rather than rent a car when in Seattle, but I don't venture out of the West Seattle-Seattle-Bellevue core where service is pretty good.

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Yeah, but you don't have to deal with it every single day. Metro offers pretty horrendous bus service especially considering their cost per passenger one of the highest in the country. Recently voters thwacked a measure seeking more funding for Metro and one of the main reasons I think (among others like aversion to car tab expenses) was anger at mismanagement.

I deal with it every single day (living in the CD, working on the Eastside) and I like it. I use it as my primary mode of transportation, with Car2Go a distant second. The measure seeking more funding for Metro (I assume you mean King County TBD Prop 1) was to replace funding that got crushed in the economic downturn and resulting plunge in sales tax. Funding transit by sales tax is unstable but it's all the legislature gives us, other than vehicle registration fees that everyone seems to hate. Prop 1 passed 2-to-1 in Seattle and, if a similar plan goes to the city voters in November, I bet it passes.

Metro's "mismanagement" is because it is directly accountable to the King County Council and, thus, to politically-motivated voters. One look at route 2 and its difficult, congested routing across IH-5 shows a prime example. Sound Transit, on the other hand, has an appointed board and can move much more quickly.

My experience is that everybody (where everybody is defined as a significant majority but not everyone) tends to be at least fairly negative about public transportation that they're forced to use day in and day out. I could name a number of cities that I consider to have pretty good transit if you're going from the right point A to the right point B where I could still imagine it being pretty tiresome using it all the time for a variety of reasons.

NYC has by-far the best transit in the US, and people still constantly complain about it. I don't think there's any method of commuting people actually like, other than maybe bikes.

I used it every day through much of the 90s. I used to commute to UW on the 372 from...Bothell, later to downtown Seattle from the U district a lot. Metro is at least way better than Community Transit.

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