Month: December 2017

When the Alaskan Way Viaduct undergoes demolition next year, WSDOT plans to use the Battery Street Tunnel as a disposal site for the Viaduct’s debris, but a group of residents is pushing for a second life for the 65-year old tunnel.

The group Recharge the Battery says anything is better than the current plan to fill and seal the tunnel, however with only a year left before leveling of the viaduct is scheduled to begin the group is racing to rally support from the community.

The group envisions the tunnel becoming a “defining urban icon for the City of Seattle and valuable public asset for the Belltown neighborhood and surrounding communities.”

The cut-and-cover Battery Street Tunnel, which runs under Battery Street from Highway 99 to 1st Avenue, was the first tunnel designed and built by the City of Seattle Engineering Department, according to the final environmental impact statement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project. 

Earlier this year Recharge the Battery made an open call for proposals reimagining, without limits, a future use for the space. Ideas ranged from building a mushroom farm or a wine cellar to constructing an underground beach or allowing drone racing. One award-winning conceptual design envisioned a publicly accessible forested ravine which could also filter stormwater before returning it to Elliot Bay. Back in April Zach discussed the idea of using the tunnel for transit.

The group says there’s a wide range of possibilities, pointing to projects such as Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River Restoration which uncovered an ancient river while creating a public recreational space after removing a large highway. Or the city could imitate New York City, using the space for a transit museum.

Continue reading “When can Public Infrastructure be Repurposed?”

Charles Mudede is latest in a line of columnists (see here, here, here, and here) drawing comparisons between the rapidly appreciating housing markets in Seattle and Vancouver, BC:

The forces at work in Vancouver BC’s housing market seem unrelated to those at work in, say, Toronto’s—a city that, like Seattle, has a real economy and lots of high-paying jobs. Vancouver, on the other hand, “relies largely on an inflow of foreign money to fuel its real estate industry.”

After acknowledging that Seattle’s demand may be less finance-driven, Mudede still says later on that we have “lost Seattle to finance” in the same way as Vancouver. That’s not the only perceived similarity between the cities. He asks Globe and Mail reporter Kerry Gold about Vancouver’s HALA-like proposal:

They have also acknowledged that their policy to build tons of market condos backfired, because they became the perfect speculative commodity. So that’s all fine and good. But their strategy, which calls for greater numbers of rental buildings and incentives for developers to build more affordable housing, largely depends on addressing demand at the same time. If they just build, build, build, which has been our way, the hyper-commodification of housing will just continue. They need to address the demand side—as in, closing the floodgates with a speculator tax, or bigger foreign buyer tax, or even banning foreign buying of existing properties, the way New Zealand just did.

I think there’s reason to believe Seattle’s market has key differences from Vancouver. In particular, legal incentives to build apartments instead of condos ($) often limit investors to the single family market. While skyrocketing single-family prices are painful for those looking for a larger house, they are largely orthogonal to the question of how many homes the City of Seattle should build. But let’s set that aside and assume that the tide of foreign money is coming for us next.

Like an overcrowded light rail train, or a gas tax that can’t raise money because no one buys gas, this seems like a nice problem to have. First, an investor that rents out her property is not contributing to the housing shortage, but instead shifting inventory from the purchase market to the rental one. This, on balance, is a progressive move.

Moreover, even outside investment in an empty tower (the dreaded “speculators”) creates working-class jobs to build and operate the building, and implies a commitment to pay property taxes (and other levies, like affordable housing funds) without consuming much in the way of services. The only cost is a tiny bit of land, land that is only scarce because of artificial zoning restrictions. In the limit where speculator money is truly bottomless, various taxes and fees on endless new buildings could probably fund all the city’s needs with little or no burden on residents.

Indeed, for all Vancouver’s outstanding success boosting transit ridership with aggressive upzones around stations, their overall zoning map isn’t all that better than ours, as Matt Nicholson’s wonderful map shows:

Continue reading “Does Foreign Capital Trump Supply and Demand?”

Sound Transit will extend its paid permit program at park-and-ride facilities to include solo drivers. The assurance of a guaranteed spot could cost commuters as much as $90 a month if Sound Transit charges the average market rate for these spaces.

Currently, carpools with two or more riders are eligible to purchase a $5 parking permit for nine park and ride locations: the Angle Lake Station, Auburn Station, Federal Way Transit Center, Issaquah Transit Center, Kent Station, Puyallup Station, Sumner Station, Tukwila International Boulevard Station and Tukwila Sounder Station. Metro has a similar program at 15 other park-and-rides.

Sound Transit began selling these HOV parking permits in 2016, which gives commuters access to priority parking areas during the morning rush hour on weekdays. Spaces in permit zones open up for general use after the morning rush hour and on weekends. Up to 50% of parking spaces at each station are reserved for permit holders.

Sound Transit manages about 11,800 parking spaces across 37 owned and leased facilities in Snohomish, King and Pierce counties.

During yesterday’s Operations and Administration Committee meeting, Abby Chazanow, a transportation planner at Sound Transit, told board members that a 2014 pilot project showed there was “quite a bit of demand and a strong willingness to pay” among commuters.

Continue reading “Sound Transit Expanding Parking Permit Program”

A new exhibit presents a vision of a fossil-fuel-free mobility system in a city not designed around cars.

As automobiles began taking over cities in the early 1900s, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s fair titled “Futurama”  gave visitors a glimpse of a city twenty years in the future where cars ruled the landscape.

The vision, sponsored by the General Motors Corporation, equated new with better included a superhighway system which connected small towns and a metropolis “replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system.”

A video documenting the exhibit declared “Over space man has begun to win victory, space for living, space for working, space for play, all available for more people than ever before.”

That car-utopia vision never quite panned out leaving cities to deal with traffic congestion, pollution and freeways that separated — and in many cases destroyed — neighborhoods. Inspired by, yet a critique of, that car-centric vision is the exhibit Futurama Redux, opening today at the Center for Architecture & Design. Futurama Redux presents a best-case scenario thirty years in the future after a post-carbon transition which rejects car-centric city planning — instead designing streets around urban dwellers.

Continue reading “Imagining a Post-Carbon Transportation System”