I had to walk 12 miles south from Bellevue Washington to get home. I stopped to rest twice. It took almost three hours.
It hit me hard for a few days.
Picking up the car, and the other like it on another trip a few days ago was easier.
I walk a mile to a bus stop and take the 240, It meanders, but after it goes through a transfer station by I-90 I get off and walk another 2 miles to the mechanic and pick up the car.
Paying the thirty bucks for an Uber for the 12 mile hike getting home would have been smarter. (But as a former Yellow Cab driver, I hate taking what I consider to be a gypsie cab.)
Since I picked the car up the next day I wound up doing 15 miles in 12 hours after a shift at work where I walk at least two miles a day. My feet hurt and I felt weak.
Busses here function well enough to get the precariat to and from work. Everyone else has a car. Without a car it takes a long time to get around. Hours.
The level of service seems constant through the years. Probably better here than in many places. My route through the burbs ran on the hour. But not at night. The busses are air conditioned and in very good shape.
Seattle and the surrounding area did not do mass transit when they should have, but light rail is being built now between Seattle and Bellevue and south to Tacoma. It is fancy and construction has been massive and fast. The one existing line is now not as worthless as it was.
For years the only light rail ran between the Airport and Downtown Seattle. Good for tourists and nobody else. The line now goes north into Seattle underground with stops in three neighborhoods. Soon the same line will go south from the Airport to Tacoma.
The lines are multi-billion dollar projects. The rails cost over 200 million a mile.
It boggles my mind. Ongoing the lines will be very useful for a few hundred people who live and work in exactly the right places. Zipping between Seattle and Bellevue on fancy European Light Rail will be a thing. A thing that costs a lot of bling.
That is the Seattle Airport control tower next to the light rail. I rode this uncomfortable pig once.
I can't see how the twenty plus or so billion dollars spent to build all this can possibly make sense. It serves essentially forty miles of bus route, and that is all. A bus route with logistics which do not suit many local lifestyles since the rail line pops underground, rides elevated trusses, and crosses a lake. I don't see many local residents using the thing on a regular basis.