Transportation: Take the next car

While we weren't in support of the South Lake Union Streetcar, now that it's up and running, we support the plan to expand its services.

In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

We can't afford to let the tiny 1.3-mile streetcar line languish as we've done with the 1-mile Monorail line, a relic isolated from the city's transportation system and stuck in time warp.

Connecting dense areas such as Fremont or Ballard to downtown Seattle and the Central District could be a vital piece to solving the transportation puzzle, moving the maximum number of people in the most efficient (fiscal, environmental and temporal) way.

Even if people still decide to drive to any of the areas served by the streetcar, they can use the service to move around the city throughout the day -- running errands, attending meetings, etc. -- keeping their cars off city roads for most of the day.

Given our druthers, we'd rather see the streetcar head to West Seattle before stretching out to the University of Washington, which will have a light rail station and a line connecting it to neighborhoods running all the way to Sea-Tac Airport by 2016. Although if private financiers are anxious to help pay for any portion of the thing -- to UW or elsewhere -- we'll certainly take what we can get.