The “Stop calling me Shirley!” joke appeared in the movie “Airplane,” not as Mike Davis wrote in his guest column (“A subway?” July 24, 2013) on the old “Laugh-In” TV show. That, unfortunately, was not his only error.
He claims that West Coast cities do not and should not build subways because of the threat of earthquakes, citing the fact that only a bit more than 100 miles of the Bay Area’s subway (BART) in San Francisco are underground. He apparently does not know that, right now, San Francisco is building an additional underground subway from North Beach to downtown. Nor does he mention that much of BART in
Oakland and Berkeley is also underground. Los Angeles, contrary to Davis’ assertion, does have a subway.
Speaking of Oakland, the 1989 Bay Area earthquake significantly damaged the above-ground, bi-level Cypress Street Viaduct (part of Interstate 880) while leaving the underground BART unscathed.
Only a subway will provide significant rapid transit without further clogging Seattle’s streets. Let’s add one to the tunnels, including the railroad tunnel) we already have. It is more expensive in the short run, but surely cheaper and much more useful over time.
Jerry Richard
Queen Anne
My [letter] pertains to the guest article by Mike Davis in your issue of
July 24.
The city of Vienna in Austria has a population of 1.73 million people. More than 1.3 million people take the Vienna subway every day. That does not include ridership on the thousands of tramways, buses and other railways.
To say in his article that daily ridership in richer cities around the world never rises above 20 percent is very untrue, and you should correct this error in your next issue. It is misleading information.
Florian Hladik, M.D., Ph.D.
Seattle
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