Should Seattle Adopt A Mass Transit System To Improve Traffic Congestion And Air Quality?

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Should Seattle adopt a mass transit system to improve traffic congestion and air quality?
Case in point: The Seattle Monorail Project

March 8, 2004


Seattle has some of the worst traffic congestion of cities in the United States. The Texas Transportation Institute ranked the Seattle-Everett metropolitan area 12th out of 75 cities in the nation in October or 2003 in its Urban Mobility Report. City planning has had much to do with this. The city has grown and developed with the automobile as a main mode of transportation in mind. As Alex Marshall explains in his book, How Cities Work, our communities do not shape our transportation networks, but rather our transportation networks shape our communities by determining what areas are accessible.
Automobile use in urban areas is increasing. Kumares C. Sinha describes trends in world population and motorization growth in “Sustainability and Urban Public Transportation.” Data on urban density, automobile ownership, and transit ridership were taken from 38 cities worldwide between 1960 and 1990. Of those 38 urban areas, only four showed an increase in population density. The rest showed a decrease. There was also a direct association between low urban densities and high private vehicle ownership and uses. Urban areas worldwide are sprawling as automobile use increases.
This high quantity of motor vehicles in use on the roadways each day has detrimental effects on human health and the environment. Car emissions seriously degrade air quality. The Smart Communities Network, a division of the US Department of Energy, gives and excellent description of the toxic pollutants released into the air by cars. “The automobile is the largest single source of toxic emissions in urban areas. Vehicle emissions contribute 57 percent of the nitrogen oxides (NOx) and 82 percent of the carbon monoxide (CO) found in the air of California urban areas, according to a study by the Ca...