I’d post the HistoryLink essay on this topic (AGAIN!) but it looks like that site has been infected by a virus Anyhow, posting that has never seemed to disabuse Andrew and Ben of their ridiculous notions about why people moved there and what “they” wanted (nice othering, very subtle), so I don’t know what good it would be except maybe infecting their M$ computers with malware, that’d be good fun.

2) It wasn’t the people who moved there who didn’t want sidewalks, it was the original developers who skimped on them. Most of North Seattle was built during or just after World War II not 80 years ago, as well. So yes, they are automobile suburbs but so are many neighborhoods of West Seattle and West Seattle has way more residential sidewalks.

3) Residential street rights of way in North Seattle are generally quite narrow – street widths are not at all comparable to even Shoreline let alone Bellevue, Kirkland, etc. But it does vary from tract to tract.

4) With the exception of a very small area around Haller Lake most of North Seattle is and was much more working class than, let’s say, Capitol Hill in either the 1940s or today, so I find some well-fed Microsofties playing the class card to be amusing. It was never as poor as the Valley but the SF houses are generally small (1200-1500 sq ft) and there is a sizable amount of multifamily clumped around the arterials. The well-off, once again, moved to Kirkland and Bellevue (you know, serial catowner and Bernie’s progenitors) NOT to North Seattle.

If they come out of the streets, we could have some really nice, narrow residential streets if we ever put in sidewalks. But if they come out of yards, I can see why there’s never been a lot of momentum to put them in.

http://wagda.lib.washington.edu/

Interestingly, Lake Washington Boulevard is conspicuously absent from both, and things like the Seward Park loop (closed to vehicles) and (it would appear) the railroad tracks along the North Seattle’s west coast are included. Lake Washington Boulevard feels like a rural, two-lane highway during commute times – drivers commonly pass just like you would on, say, US-2 over Stevens Pass.

Thank you developers!!

gridiron plan street network… is thought of as “inefficient”, because it has a high ratio of street ROW to private property, as where winding suburban street network are “efficient” because they have a low ratio of private property to public ROW

Isn’t a high ratio of street ROW to private property the same thing as a low ratio of private property to public ROW?

Jane Jacobs also makes the point that shorter blocks are more human scale. She contrasts the short avenue blocks of Manhattan’s east side with the long blocks of the west side. Short blocks means there’s always something interesting coming up to break the monotony. Long blocks make feel like it takes forever to cross them, and drive people to their cars. She says people are always going through the buildings on the west side looking for a mid-block passage to the next street, which doesn’t exist, but they keep looking for it anyway because surely anybody in their right mind would have put one there.

The Bell Street plan looks all right since it does provide an auto lane. Bell Street is a major connection from Denny Way to 1st Avenue. Maybe there are too many lanes in Belltown and some could be reused. That doesn’t mean entire streets should be eliminated.

I don’t think development “efficient” road networks are necessarily bad if there are foot and bike paths to connect people with where they need to go. For example, look at UW campus on that map. There’s just one loop through campus that’s regularly used by cars and buses. The rest of those streets are for deliveries, utility access, disabled parking, etc., and regularly have people riding bikes or walking on them (in more safety than a typical street, I might add). Altogether the streets are a fairly low percentage of the land, yet UW is one of the densest areas of the city (due to a few highrises and a lot of 5-8 story buildings).

I don’t think UW campus is perfect and a lot of it built in the last 50 years is terrible. We have the the Olmsted brothers and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition to thank for most of it.