Tacoma vs. Fort Worth

Tacoma is to Seattle sorta like Fort Worth is to Dallas. Tacoma's population is around 200,000, Seattle's a bit over a half million, both in a Metro area of about 3 million.

Fort Worth's population is over 700,000, Dallas over a million, both in a Metro zone approaching 6 million.

Fort Worth, with a population over 3 times bigger than Tacoma, is in the early talking about it stage of building some sort of rail transit. Tacoma already has such a thing. That's one of the Sound Transit trains in the photo, near Tacoma's museums, like the Glass Museum. Tacoma does not call its museum district their Cultural District, though, like Fort Worth does.

Also in the museum area is Tacoma's new $300 million convention center. Fort Worth spent a bit over $100 million updating their outdated, seldom used convention center and had to fund it in 3 stages. A new hotel was built across the Sound Transit rail line from Tacoma's convention center. Fort Worth had to give tax breaks to get a new hotel for their convention center.

It is free to ride Tacoma's Sound Transit. It runs from a transit hub similar to Fort Worth's downtown transit hub, only in Tacoma instead of the T Train running to Dallas you have the Sounder train running to Seattle and beyond. Fort Worth tried to have a market at its downtown transit hub. The delusional locals claimed it was modeled after Seattle's Pike Place and other successful markets. And that it was the first public market in Texas. It quickly failed. This was the first Fort Worth Boondoggle that I got to witness. It was called the Santa Fe Rail Market.

Tacoma's transit hub has a Santa Fe Rail Market type thing with some differences, the main one being that it is successful. And that it actually does sort of resemble a small version of Pike Place.

Well, in a couple hours I'll be going from the ridiculous to the sublime. I expect to have a fresh blackberry milkshake within the next 24 hours. That's the main thing I'm looking forward to.