Month: April 2008

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

While searching for something else, I came across this fascinating 20-year-old piece from the NYT Magazine on traffic and congestion. Lots of great quotes, like this:

The frustration and anxiety, the irrational and antisocial behavior of trapped motorists have turned cities and freeway systems into war zones. Older cities are watching their roadways and bridges shut down. Newer cities are seeing uncontrolled development at rates that leave behind any conceivable program of road building. And in any case, the time for highway construction is past.

Past, eh? Tell that to Dino Rossi. This is also fun:

Some experiments with ”high-occupancy vehicle lanes” have successfully encouraged car pooling, but others have been killed by local protest groups. On the whole, riders prefer more than ever to be alone in their cars. Average occupancy has fallen to less than one and one-sixth persons a car.

Cue the mayor from Singles: “people like their cars.” Not much changes.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

For my money, the money quote from Ben’s epic 6-part live blog of the Urban Land Institute’s conference is this paraphrase of Gov. Gregoire’s remarks:

She’s discussing funding mechanisms for transportation, and who permits development – the fact that we need to streamline permitting, for instance, where we now have a mishmash of city, county, state, and federal, rather than an integrated system.

She’s addressing framing very well here. She’s pointing out that we are not forcing anyone out of their cars, or to move to places where they don’t want to live, but rather we’re creating affordable housing and transportation that people will choose to live in, and choose to use.

She’s brought up LA and Houston as examples of cities where the choices made, where the planning used, did not effectively address growth – and that we don’t want to go that way, but we need to work together now, because we don’t have more time to wait.

The key part is “choose.” You have to make it attractive. Which is why this Times piece today on the brewing backlash against town homes is so interesting. Some are quite nice, but many are bland and from the outside, and almost all hide themselves from the street with monotonous wood fencing.

Still, town houses are the most reasonable way to densify the city and keep it affordable to middle-class families. So how do you make them better? Ditching the onerous parking requirements would be a start, so the market has room to innovate. Better design review might help. But the real issue, it seems to me, is that there’s no real financial incentive for better-designed townhomes.

Why? For one, you can’t copyright them easily. So, as one builder quoted in the article says, “once one guy cracks the code and develops one plan, everybody jumps on board and says, ‘I’ll just do that because it’s easy.’ ” Second, there’s a classic collective action problem: a sub-par design affects the whole neighborhood, but no one person (say, the buyer) is affected enough to justify paying a lot more for a better design (mortgages are expensive!). Finally, a design review process, no matter how strong, is always going to be weaker than the market.

I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to this problem, but I hope someone figures it out before the same townhome design populates the entire city.

PS: Ben says that Nickels is still planning a vote on ST 2.1 for this fall.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

10 options are on the table for the Alaskan Way Viaduct. You’ll recall that there were once six, then it was down to two, then we voted “no” on both, and so now we’re fully out the other side of the rabbit hole.

Though it’s easy to dismiss this as more of the loathed “Seattle process,” it’s important to remember that some really critical decisions have actually been made. For example, in the time since the “no rebuild” option was first discarded, WSDOT officially re-defined its mission from moving cars to moving people. And we got a much better idea of the actual vehicular traffic on the highway (there are not, in fact, that many trucks that use it).

It isn’t always obvious, but we are making progress.

Update: Erica Barnett says the Times is being too generous by giving all options equal weight.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Former Mercer Island Mayor Aubrey Davis takes a hammer to Dino Rossi’s transportaiton proposal in today’s Seattle Times:

Engineering studies show that dumping eight lanes of traffic from 520 onto an already congested I-5 and I-405 would virtually shut down both freeways and create gridlock across the region. I-5 and I-405 would become the most expensive parking lots on Earth. Connecting an eight-lane 520 to I-5 and I-405 would be like trying to connect a fire hydrant to a garden hose, and the ones getting wet would be us, the taxpayers.

It has been estimated that billions of dollars in new lanes on I-5 and I-405 would be needed to make this fire hydrant-to-garden hose connection that Rossi proposes even remotely possible. These costs are not accounted for in Rossi’s plan and funding is not available.

Davis clearly hasn’t read the part of Ross’s plan where he promisies free jet skis for everyone.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

9th Avenue in South Lake Union was restriped over the weekend, and is now a two-way street with bike lanes in either direction.

This is the complement to Westlake Avenue, which also went two-way recently. Bicyclists who were getting stuck in the streetcar tracks on Westlake can now use 9th instead and have their own dedicated lane.

I’m all for more two-way streets in Seattle. Except for downtown (and maybe the Roosevelt Ave-11th Ave NE combo in the U District), the traffic doesn’t really justify these wide, 3-lane one-way streets. They encourage speeding and bad driving. Just the other day, I was heading south on 9th Ave when another driver ahead of me decided to slowly drift across all three empty lanes — no turn signal, of course — right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and we came with inches of crashing.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Neat story in the NY Times about DIY efforts to spruce up L.A.’s bus stations:

But scores of bus stops around town, especially in the areas south of Interstate 10 and close to downtown, not only are trash-strewn and barren but also offer no place to sit. Old women press heavily against their walkers, peering down the street to see if the bus is coming, and children cling to the bus stop sign, often perilously close to the street, as their mothers beckon them sharply to stand back.

So, armed with grant money, hammers and some technical help, residents around the city have gone about spiffing up bus stops, among a number of other outdoor spaces, into something known as community living rooms.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve driven under the new 41st St. Interchange up in Everett a few times, but I’ve never gotten off there, and thus never seen the really neat signal setup they’ve got going on. I’ve never seen anything quite like this:

You can watch an animation of the interchange in action here.

This comes via WSDOT’s announcement that the HOV lanes on I-5 have been completed from Seattle to Everett.