Competition for the Grinch of the Year awards is already heating up. Our first nominee is this pizza store owner on the outskirts of Olympia that won’t turn on the heat for his employees.

Photo by Flickr user Oran Viriyincy

At Seattle Transit Blog they’ve been talking about the fare structure for the new light rail system that’s going to run from downtown to the airport. Yesterday they reported that Sound Transit was considering calculating the fares based on the distance you travel: a base fee, plus a certain charge per mile. in this case, $2 plus five cents per mile (rounded to the nearest quarter). That would make traveling from downtown to the airport a very reasonable $2.75. Fares to other stops on the line would vary accordingly. One reader put together an estimated fare table, as seen above. And a lot of others had their own comments to add, on the original and a follow-up post.

This proposal would include keeping the tunnel through downtown a ride-free zone. Another idea they’re kicking around is to charge for the tunnel too, but lower all fares by 25 cents. So the base rate would start at $1.75. This would be confusing, though, since buses in the tunnel would be free but trains would cost. Either way, though, there’s the question of enforcement, and how to handle someone who boards in the free zone, then travels outside of it.

Still, these prices are pretty low, and less than similar light rail systems I’ve been on in Sacramento and San Francisco. I guess the distances in those system are greater, though, with BART running over nearly the whole Bay Area.

Horsesass.org brings to light some of the overlooked victims of all the snow and ice over the last couple of weeks, the poor road turtles that mark lanes on the roads in the area. These turtles are used on many roads because they’re reflective and easy to see even in the rain, and they cause a rumble when you drive over them to let you know when you’re drifting out of your lane. But because they stick up from the road surface, the snowplows are not friendly at all to these turtles, and many of them were damaged, broken, and scraped away, even though in many places they weren’t plowing down to the pavement.

Of course here in western Nevada we have simlilar devices that are plow-friendly. We have flexible road markers that stick up when it’s dry but lay down flat when a plow comes by, and grooves that are etched into the road surface to let you know when you’re drifting. But I suppose there’s no need to change over everything in the Seattle area just for the once-a-decade snowstorm. The poor turtles that will be lost, I suppose, are just collateral damage.

Happy New Year! This blog has only been around for a month now, so I feel like I’ve been running my warm-up laps and in 2009 I can really get to running. 2009 is also the year we’re supposed to move to Seattle, so we’ve got job hunting, house selling, U-Haul packing, and home seeking all to look forward to this year. Sounds like so much work; can’t I just skip forward to next New Year’s, when it’s all done?