We've been locking our keyboard in a drawer to keep ourselves from putting up any "this is the weekend the green line would have begun service" posts, both because it's been done and because it's history. Yes, it would have been great to have, but we decided against it. If there's anything like a blog to mark the day in the distant future when we'd have it paid off we'll be impressed. But a reader......

Man, Seattle can not get over the monorail. Not the new monorail that was going to hasten our commute into the Utopian future - We seem to have gotten over that one. It's the monorail from Westlake Center to the Seattle Center that we won't give up on; Monorail Classic or Monorail 1.0 or whatever you want to call that leftover from the World's Fair. It was a good little train once upon a time,......

Today, it's $4.5 million, as reported by the Seattle P-I and Seattle Times. A year ago, the Seattle Times reported, unquestioningly, the "news" that: Seattle's existing monorail may need up to $100 million in reconstruction if the proposed monorail from West Seattle to Ballard is scuttled by voters or elected officials... The city has deferred maintenance on the monorail, which carries 2 million riders a year, because the new line was supposed to replace......

Bus Rapid Transit as an alternative to actual mass transit sucks. It's what anti-transit people offer to cities to ridicule their efforts at light rail or monorails. "You want to move people around without cars, eh? How about this ridiculous thing, then? You can't say no! It isn't a car! Look, it can move people from poor inner suburbs to job sites just as well as elevated trains and it costs nothing so in two......

Ding dong the car tax's dead. The wicked car tax is dead. Well, not officially dead like you'll get out of paying it if your car tabs come up this month, but the Monorail Project has started the process of ending the tax on June 30th, due to the fact that all those sexy properties the Project swept up to make way for the Green Line have been selling like hotcakes. Uh, hotcakes that you......

A new shuttle bus service is offering Port Townsend residents service to Seattle twice daily seven days a week. It seems that there's been local demand for some transport to the city from that area that doesn't involve cars and Olympic Bus Lines answered the call. Particularly interesting to Seattlest is the reverse ability to get from the city to Port Townsend without a car. A round trip ticket from PT to Seattle will set......

Greg Nickels made Rolling Stone. Is his new disc out? No. Is he being heralded as one of our country's leading environmentalists? He is! He's one of the "Warriors and Heros: Twenty-five leaders who are fighting to stave off the planetwide catastrophe." Uh, no mention of his significant role in the killing of the green line, but the magazine loved his motions towards Kyoto. Seattlest had an opinion of the mayor's Kyoto commitment back in......

The Seattle Monorail, which has already endured more obloquy than Lindsay Lohan's dietician, is in trouble again. The Seattle P-I has been screaming bloody murder this week, proclaiming on their front page that the Monorail's proposed Green Line will cost "$11 billion." The City Council, which apparently has final say on the project (despite the fact that voters approved it four separate f***ing times), has turned into a Chicken Little brigade, led by longtime......

All the extra money you've been shelling out for car tabs will actually be used for something. The P-I reports this morning that the Seattle Monorail Project has reached agreement with contractors to build the Green Line, from Ballard to West Seattle. The first passengers would board in 2010. Details of the $1.6 billion plan: --Stations will be open-air, not covered as originally planned. Winners: Umbrella manufacturers Losers: Whiny California transplants --The Monorail will not......

Seattlest loves transit. So we love the insight the Simpsons writers have into the transit projects. In Seth's article about the monorail's burgeoning expenses, you can find info on the Simpsons' monorail episode, part of which is that ingenious song, the Monorail Song, that includes this line: Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken... Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken! Indeed the mob has spoken. But still, I can't wait for the......

When we were young, Seattlest used to try to negotiate our allowance. It never worked. Upon growing older, and becoming veterans of negotiation with car dealers, landlords, and girlfriends, we realized why. We lacked leverage. There was no other set of parents offering a better deal. The only negotiating tactic we really had was to whine and stomp our feet. This is where the Seattle Monorail Project finds itself. It has exactly one bidder......