Last week, I decided I should go ahead and take a ride on everyone’s favorite South Lake Union Trolley (S.L.U.T.). Sure, it’s only $1.50 a trip, but she’s still new to the game and probably hasn’t had time to pick up anything dangerous.

When I went to the S.L.U.T.’s Web site at seattlestreetcar.org to look up the nearest route, however, I more or less lost interest in it completely. When they named it the “South Lake Union” streetcar, they weren’t kidding.

The streetcar line, as I see it and as it stands now, is absolutely without purpose. The area it seeks to connect is the one part of town that I’ve never in my three years of living in downtown Seattle had reason to visit. Honestly, if I’m in that area, it’s because I’m passing through on my way elsewhere.

This tiny quibble of an issue serves as the tip of an iceberg, however. Think about it: In order to get to the streetcar line, I would have to take a bus or drive my car to the nearest station (that being Fairview and Campus Drive, in my case). Since my final destination will be downtown somewhere, I’ll probably have another mile or two to go before I reach my final destination.

If I have to take a bus or drive my car into downtown in order to be within reach of the streetcar, what’s stopping me from just driving or taking the bus that last additional mile or so to my final stop and pocketing the $1.50?

In my mind, it would have made much more sense to begin constructing the streetcar network not from the inside out, as is being done now, but from the outside in. Streetcars and trains could have been used to ferry people from the various park-and-rides and other locations outside downtown (in satellite boroughs) to the outer fringe of downtown, where they could then take a bus from that very stop to wherever they need to go.

Such a plan would serve to keep a large amount of cars out of downtown, and isn’t that what public transportation is trying to do? As the system now stands, streetcars will continue to run nearly empty much of the time as cars continue to flow into the city. Drivers don’t want to deal with an inefficient bus system that can no longer afford to advance itself in a timely manner, simply because the empty streetcars are using all of the metro funding.

The system is backward.