Excellent article here about the problems with the RapidRide R proposal. Making buses faster is good, but not by making the service less useful. Eliminating all these stops defeats the purpose of transit. Metro exists to serve the people, and the people don’t want these stops to close.

This is the thing! Not every bus route is the same, and making people walk along Rainier Avenue for several additional blocks adds time and danger (because, again, it's one of the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in the city, a problem that has never been treated with any urgency.)

But it won't be more frequent...the rapid ride standard is actually less frequent than the 7 runs currently. With metro facing a fiscal cliff, I wouldn't be surprised to see less frequent service in the future.

Especially when Metro hasn't been able to tell us what actual time saving would result from the stop elimination. If you have to walk and extra five or ten minutes to a stop, your trip becomes longer and more physically difficult, and this is particularly true for disabled people, seniors & parents

I lived off Rainier for a long time, and the only thing that made grocery shopping possible was the fact that there was a stop right by my apartment. Accessing stores, the food bank, schools, work, and more is going to become more challenging when people have to travel long distances between stops.

OK, but I wish there was more acknowledgement among pro-transit folks (of which I am obviously one) that not every bus route is the same and that some local routes need to exist. There's community pushback against eliminating stops on the 7 for real, practical reasons, not kneejerk reactiveness.

Yes, that's where I saw the moose!

Note -- if fatal crashes or injuries happen on trails (not official roads) they often are not reported in crash statistics. And since many communities are connected by ATV and snow machine trails, even if emergency response occurs, crash data not collected in travel injury databases.

Even in Anchorage, which has lots of cars, I've really noticed so many folks walking and rolling out of necessity. Way more common than Seattle for instance.

There is a lot of freight rail. Way more than I expected, honestly (all night, lots of train whistles). The train goes 470mi from Seward to Fairbanks. Sadly, the winter passenger schedule is pretty limited so I can't ride it.

Ferries! 3500 miles of routes (I think I heard that right) Before I realized how big (and roadless) Alaska was, I wanted to take the ferry from Bellingham to Juneau and then "bus" to Anchorage. Ha.

At the PacTrans conference today (I'm a board member). Did you know 83 percent of communities in Alaska are not connected by roads? Within communities, board walks often serve as roads/sidewalks.

Yesterday we got to visit the FedEx warehouse. Anchorage is #1 in US for cargo landed. #3 in the world. Because poles offer shorter flight paths.

Greetings from Anchorage. It's my first time in Alaska and I didn't expect the beautiful golden A aspen. Brought my Brompton and saw 3 moose this morning on a bike path. How do you pass a moose that won't move off the trail has been my conversation starter.

‼️ "The real choice is between an opaque, hypocritical negotiation hidden behind the fiction of neutral master plans, and an honest, institutionalized political negotiation conducted in the open light of democratic accountability."

Yes! First time.