The image above is now my regular view on the way to work and back home. The light rail itself is pretty good and only takes about an hour to go each way. The main problem is parking.
I talked to one of my coworkers who lives on the same street and in the same town as me and he said that he takes the same train as me. He said he wakes up at five in the morning and drives to the station for about thirty minutes. He said that you have to be in the parking garage before 5:30 in the morning because any later and you might not get a spot. He said that he arrived at 5:45 in the morning a couple times and all the spots in the garage and adjacent parking lots were gone...
I thought about it and I have another plan for the days that we don't need to drive our daughter to school. All the businesses around the train station started enforcing parking, so parking in those huge parking lots is not an option.
So I looked at the Google maps and I see that there are some residential areas about two miles away from the train station so I can drive there and park in the areas that allow parking. I guess for most Americans walking a couple miles or over three kilometers is a big deal, but for me it is not a big deal and I can easily do that and I will just get even more Actifit steps on the days that I would have to do that.
This picture above is from minutes ago and the African American dude is checking train fare. This is the first time I see them enforcing train fares even though I have been riding the train to and from downtown Seattle since September.
He actually caught an African American woman who it seems did not tap her Orca pass when boarding the train. She said that she doesn't recall if she tapped it. He told her that is not a big deal as he will simply issue her a warning and she can have a couple warnings before she would have to pay a twenty four dollar fine.
So that was interesting, I am glad that I have actually tapped my pass before boarding the train because I was the second person he checked with his phone device.
I guess they are starting to check to make sure bums are not using the train as the rain shelter. In Seattle it rains a lot, so they do that and the smell is not the most pleasant thing to deal with. They started doing it after Covid as all public transportation was free to ride during Covid and several years following it.
Those tents in the picture above are the tents homeless people put up and they live there. Seattle climate is very mild and the city is friendly to the homeless people, so I see a lot of them downtown and have to walk through crowds of them to get to the train station.
Sometimes I see all kinds of weird stuff like them using needles to inject drugs right on the sidewalk by the entrance to the train station and yesterday I saw a dude sleeping on the sidewalk with his naked butt facing the pedestrians. Police is always nearby but they ignore all of that...
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