Dear Mayor Elect: Please put the CD on mass transit plan

Back in the campaign season, Mayor Elect Mike McGinn got a lot of kudos in the transit community for proposing an expansion of light rail to serve West Seattle and Ballard. It looks like a good plan to give better transit service to two neighborhoods that can be notoriously hard to get to.

But here in the Central District we've got a very transit-dependent population and a diminishing level of transit performance. In spite of some modest increases in service over the last several years, our bus routes are still standing room during large portions of the day. To see how bad it is, try and grab an eastbound bus on from 5th and James at 4pm on a weekday, and you'll find that there's a good chance that a packed-to-the-gills bus will pass you by before you find one with room to get on. And adding more buses won't really help - the #3, #4, and #48 routes are already running about as frequently as you can on our narrow roads and in traffic, as evidenced by the way the buses will bunch up together at peak times.

So I'd like to ask our new Mayor, who will be in the neighborhood for a Town Hall meeting tomorrow night, when will the Central District be put on a plan, any plan, to provide real mass transit to the neighborhood? (The I-90 station doesn't really count as it's on the very south edge of the 'hood and out of reach for most)

We've got four major destinations that could use higher capacity and more speedy service :

• Between the neighborhood and downtown
• To Capitol Hill, which we currently lack any transit connections to
• To the U-district, which has very high transit ridership on the #48 route
• To the Rainier Valley, connecting with light rail to the Airport and points south.

I'm not asking for a dedicated subway just for the Central District. But it would be good to show up with a stop or two on some long-range plan that builds a route to somewhere else. For example, there's currently no plan for light rail to the northeastern part of the city. A route there could run through the u-district, through the CD, and then connect downtown. Or even a 520 rail route, which came up during the fall debates, could head south after the bridge and make a stop or two in our neighborhood. We just need to make sure that being on the east side of downtown doesn't forever put us out of reach for real transit.

All I'm asking is that we be considered and that there's a glimmer of hope of having more than buses sometime in the next 75 years. Otherwise we're going to keep adding 200 unit apartment buildings and other infill development and suddenly find that there's no capacity for people to get around.