Back in January, we were checking out what new bills had been introduced in the state legislature when I spotted Senate Bill 5067. It proposed lowering the legal alcohol limit in Washington from 0.08% to 0.05% BAC. “Have you guys heard about this?” I hollered into the newsroom. “Oh yeah, they do that every year,” someone shrugged.
They were right. There has been a perennial effort in Olympia to make our drunk driving laws stricter. But here at The Stranger, the more we talked about it, the more we realized we really didn’t know what the difference between 0.05 and 0.08% ABV felt like. And thus, an experiment was born.
Eight months later, stocked with booze, breathalyzers, and Mario Kart 64, we turned ourselves into lab (saint) rats and figured it out. Did we all drink more than we expected? Yes. Did we regret doing it on a Thursday? Yes. Did we all agree that the legal limit is too high? Find out.
Then, in a feat of poor planning, we took on a whole other challenge the next day: riding the light rail for 20 hours straight. Like most good things, it started with an argument in the office. Does Seattle’s light rail have culture? Buskers are rare. Spray paint is religiously scrubbed. Performers seldom swing from the handrails. Some of us argued that it was sterile, cultureless. Others agreed, but liked it that way. But the rest of us wondered if it was just that our train system is new. You can’t expect a toddler to be cultured—it’s still figuring out who it is.
To find out who was right, five Stranger writers rode the light rail in shifts from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m., a little hungover, a little fighting the urge to just stare into their phones for the whole ride to get it over with, and a lot wondering where that smell was coming from. You can find the Seattle transit culture, in its infancy, in our print issue, available at hundreds of locations all over the city.
This issue wasn’t all practical feats—we also explored our history (and possible future) with water transit and hashed out our transit hot takes—but we hope that this issue does feel lived. Transit isn’t just policy and public projects. It’s the everyday part of getting to every day. It’s how we experience the city, escape the city, and know the city.
See you on the 1.
Hannah Murphy Winter
Editor-in-Chief
This Issue Brought to You By….
Amyl and the Sniffers
Green apple cherry Celsius
City Market
Typing in awkward positions all over my apartment like I’m Carrie Bradshaw
Breakfast sandwiches
Acupuncture
Air conditioning
Dr. Orna Guralnik and her dog Nico
Season 24 of The Amazing Race
Handmade cut-off T-shirts
Hulk Hogan tapping out
Ozzy Osbourne biting the heads off the bats in hell
Non-consensual eye contact on the light rail
Men who love boats
Liquid lipstick
Fruit cups with Tajín and Chamoy
“About Us” by Brooke Hogan (feat. Paul Wall)
The baby bunnies in Anthony Keo’s backyard
Picking blackberries at the bus stop
Finally making a fruit-fly trap that works
Stress-eating edamame
Erika Evans’ rap at Candidate Survivor
Collective burning hatred for the Blue Angels
DEVO (now more than ever)
The fact that Mark Mothersbaugh is still hot
Becoming a (.03% THC) stoner again
Coming around on Lana Del Rey
Magic Kombucha & its perfect hippie labels & single-image website
Breathalyzing your bandmates for fun
Saigon Deli
Minus 3 tides
Xanax
