As for the hypothetical Beacon Hill commuter, who now uses Link instead of a bus… Is that a large portion of Link users? It seems odd to me that someone already close enough to walk to the Link station would rather live in a more distant neighborhood if he were able to drive to the station (and park there).

We can’t reverse 70 years of automobile dominance and it’s accompanying sprawl, but we should do our best to halt it’s growth. As Seattle grows the goal should be to encourage density from the inside out.

Some other places, like the Ranier Valley, may shift to be more place than node. Over the short term, the node aspect is important.

I realize that building a rail system from the ground up this will be hard to do initially as the system isn’t so much growing organically as being grafted into an existing city layout, but over time is the goal not a solid dense core?

South Bellevue is a major transfer point, empty area, and adjacent to a wetland and historic farm (Winters House). It’s hard to imagine TOD there until it can be built on the parking lot itself. There are few houses and no businesses within walking distance.

The Bel-Red area is built to low-density (1950s and industrial) standards, and is surrounded by neighborhood centers in every direction. So it’s easy to imagine higher density development there.

Ideally all residences are within walking distance of “places” (except farms and those who prefer to live in isolated locations), and this did exist in the streetcar era, but we can’t wave a magic wand and make it happen now. So P&R “nodes” will be necessary for the foreseeable future.

Let’s start with the needs: who wants to ride the train but has no station within walking distance, and no frequent bus to the station? Seward Park, Skyway, and those on the south Beacon hillside would ride the train if they can easily get to the station. That means driving for now, and they’d need a place to park. So there is some need for parking at the Rainier Valley stations, until bus service improves. But these stations also need to develop as “places”. So how to do both? I’d say temporary private parking lots, and perhaps a P&R at Rainier Beach, might be good things.

Going north to the unbuilt track, Capitol Hill through Northgate are all “places”. Northgate is a node because of the P&R and transit center. UW could be a node on weekends (if people park there to ride elsewhere). Capitol Hill, Brooklyn, and Roosevelt have no place for parking and no desire to add it, so they are purely places.

145th to Lynnwood are nodes because there’s little to walk to, although future TOD could modify that. Lynnwood itself talks about building a “town center” but I don’t know how far along it is.

On the west side, Ballard is a place, but it’s similar to Rainier Valley in that a lot of people would not be in walking/bus distance of the station. You’d need parking or extensive circulator buses to bring them in.

Seattle Center is both a node and a place: people live there and go to there, but others park there and ride the monorail downtown. But making some of the parking lots unnecessary would clearly improve the place. If it weren’t for the World’s Fair, lower Queen Anne would look like Capitol Hill.

Any station in Belltown would be a place. 15th/Dravus is a node, though it could become a place someday. (Too bad about the huge automobile-oriented design of the Whole Foods.)

West Seattle is similar to Ballard, but more node-oriented because the hills and limited transit make it hard to get from one part of West Seattle to another without a car.

It is interesting that Bellevue is seeking to have South Bellevue link be nodes, but East Bellevue (between Bellevue and Overlake) be a place.

Now, for McGinn’s drawing board transit investment in Seattle, where should the aim be nodes and where places? How many places in Seattle can really qualify as places (my definition: live, work, eat, school, activities for a whole family within 10 min non-personal-car transit) – and where could addition of more transit increase places?

For example the Safeway parking lot or church parking lot are going to be primarily used for parking no matter what since there is no talk about banning surface parking entirely in station areas. The question is should existing parking lots be able to sell day-long parking or should there be time limits to prevent commuter use.

My personal feeling is if the parking lot is there already the lot owner should be able to lease space to commuters. If you don’t allow the use there are still going to be people doing “hide & ride” just outside the RPZ area and in free lots that don’t do enforcement of who parks there.

I suspect there is far more “hide & ride” going on in Seattle than anyone really wants to admit. For example the first/last stops of both the 312 and 77 have a ton of people who park in residential areas nearby.

If you decide to introduce a superior service (superior, faster than buses) to a community, then you naturally attract commuters who would want to take advantage of the service.

Obvious example: Commuter to Seahawks games says “I’ll park in Tukwila, and pay $5 round trip to avoid a $40 downtown fee”. Commuter in Beacon Hill says, “I used to wait for the bus in the rain, but now I go into the tunnel and take light rail…ideally I wish I could move to a slightly cheaper neighborhood and drive to the station.”

If you don’t immediately make it easily available at both “nodes” and “places” you create “magnets” that draw in cars and commuters and overload the places and strain the nodes.

In that sense, the whole cheezy one line at a time strategy while prudent in one way, was very, very foolish in another.

Contrast for example a year I spent at UPenn in west Philadelphia. Apartment near campus, internship Downtown. Commuted on the trolley and the neighborhood I lived in grew up around the trolley line starting in the 19th century. As a result: several restaurants, a neighborhood market, a barber, a pair of bookstores etc all within 6 blocks of my stop. The guy who owned and ran the cheesesteak shop lived in the apartment over his store. The bartender at Mike’s lived in the aprtment over his bar. The guys who ran one of the bookstores walked to their shops. And each had as much stake in the quality of life in the neighborhood as the several thousand residents there. Packed trolleys everyday and little more than the usual residential street parking spots.

The Mayor didn’t say that he’s going to seek to repeal the policy preventing park and rides. No tax money is being spent on this. And no private developer is asking to build one.

Now, it might be an interesting debate if the market were to encourage developers to seek to build parking lots… but that’s STILL not what’s happening here.

This all started because some owners want to use already existing parking lots to make a little money in this down economy. That’s it.

Why would anyone prefer to see empty pavement not being utilized in the community instead of letting a few dozen commuters potentially discover how great light rail can be as a commuter option?