This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Vintage Seattle has a great postcard of 1970s Bellevue. Bellevue’s growth over the last few years is a good reminder of how much the region’s changed, and how much the center of gravity has shifted away from Seattle over the years.* In the 1960s, you could build a Seattle-centric transportation system. No more.
Ironically, despite greatly increasing its stature and urbanity vis-a-vis Seattle, Bellevue still seems interested in pushing transit out to the hinterlands, rather than have it run where people live.
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* Obviously Seattle’s still the big dog, but in relative terms its unipolarity has declined as the rest of King County has grown in population.