My former partner’s family is a part of the wealthy culture of the eastside. I am a regular Joe who grew up solidly middle class and worked a physically demanding but popularly considered “noble” profession for most of my life.
I had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall for many dinner party conversations over that past several years on the topic of the light rail and what the zeitgeist of that spectrum of people held as it applies to light rail as well as other things. God I hope I used that word correctly, please don’t eat me.
Pre-completion of the light rail, the discussion always focused on how it would be underutilized, how it was a big waste of taxpayer dollars, and the disruption construction caused to motor vehicle traffic.
Obviously it was a disruption to traffic, and the construction over the floating bridge had some major issues. Such is the cost of development and a realized risk of being the first to engineer a train over a floating bridge in the whole world.
The underutilization though I thought was very interesting in how the dinner party conversation shifted after project completion. No longer could they claim no one would use it since now the park and ride locations, at least where I have used them and heard reports, on the eastside are packed with many additional vehicles still searching for a spot by mid morning on Tues, Wed, Thurs. At this point the dinner talk began to be about how they wouldn’t want to share a packed train car with “smelly” strangers. Which are preferences and some people have sensitivities that public transport can affect and my point here isn’t to evangelize trains, there are plenty of places you can get that.
However my take away is that in these circles they did not want to take in new information that was counter to their original assumptions and instead shifted the goalposts to their own personal aversion to utilizing public transit. This particularly bothered me because it would often be bookended by conversations about how non-specialized workers in areas of the eastside would demand higher wages, which obviously the people could afford, they would just have fewer luxury goods attributed to them as individuals if their business was more fairly distributing its profits. The train provides a fast, reliable(mostly), and efficient transportation for non-specialized workers to be able to live in a lower COL area and still be able to work in and provide services for the wealthy eastside enclaves. Which would directly benefit these same people who are the owners of said businesses by reducing the pressure for higher wages by a vastly increased pool of potential employees.
I could go on with my rant but I gotta do some laboring now. I’m probably just a bit bitter at holding back from a more confrontational approach in those moments due to wanting to keep the peace. The experience of being in a wealthy environments after having done physical labor actually kind of put me off the idea of wanting many of the luxury items of the wealthy as it really showed me that fast cars and fancy clothes or whatever luxuries you’re into pales in comparison to less status based pursuits in life. At least for me. Ok back to the grindstone.
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