CityNerd on the Pike Place and Pike Street pedestrianizations, interviewed by Kenji López-Alt. (CityNerd)
Why Americans don’t walk to school anymore. It’s about the sidewalks. (Evan Edinger)
This is an open thread.
34 Replies to “Sunday Movie: Walking at Pike Place Market & to School”
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RE the walking video:
The narrator explains the hazards of walking well. In particular, it is revealing how baby places give lip service to walking but don’t put the effort to actually create a pedestrian network — both sidewalks and crosswalks. That’s true with money, development requirements and liability.
There are two contributing factors that he doesn’t mention:
1. Elementary schools are larger. 100 years ago it was more common to have just one or two classrooms per school. Today, the need to add all this on-site school staff (kitchens, recess, school nurse, counselors, now safety officers, etc) means that small school buildings are now a rarity. This increases the size of elementary school attendance zones and reduces the number of children that can easily walk there. It’s such an institutionalized concept that states encourage new schools to have at least 400 students and at least 10 acres, making new school buildings difficult to build so they’re often at the edge of or beyond walkable neighborhoods.
2. Even here in Seattle, the number of partners driving kids to school nearby is staggering — even with full sidewalk networks and elementary schools on the smaller size. I live near an ekentary school where the entire attendance zone is less than a mile. SPS is still running four school buses. There’s a traffic jam starting 15 minutes before dismissal of parents not only driving to the school but waiting by the school door as they leave their cars unattended. (Never mind that parents just walking from home can usually walk to the school in less than 15 minutes.).
There’s are lots of institutional challenges beyond just building sidewalks to increase walking to elementary schools. More complete pedestrian networks are great — but there are plenty of other things that need change to get parents away from being their kids’ chauffeurs.
Here is the Washington state code on minimum school sizes:
“ The minimum acreage of the site should be five usable acres and one additional usable acre for each one hundred students or portion thereof of projected maximum enrollment plus an additional five usable acres if the school contains any grade above grade six. ”
(WAC 392-342-020)
https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=392-342-020
Yeah go and take a look at relatively recent high school anywhere in Washington and you will likely be surprised at just how big the campus is. Couple that with low density, streets that often lack sidewalks, and busy family schedules, and it’s probably not surprising that a lot more kids get driven (or drive themselves) to school. SPS is the biggest district in the state but its total student population is a small fraction of the state’s students.
Pugetopolis is lucky to have better pedestrian infastructure and stroads than some parts of the country. Most of the missing sidewalks are low-volume single-family streets so there aren’t many cars and they’re slow.
The worst street I’ve encountered are 1st Ave S in Burien around 120th. I looked at an adult family home for my relative there, but crossing a 50 mph 6-lane street without a crosswalk to get to the northbound bus stop scared me. If I came monthly, eventually I might get hit by a car. And there’s no way my relative could take her walker across it to get anywhere. She had already gotten hit crossing Seneca Street a couple times at a crosswalk to get from the 2 to Virginia Mason. (The injury exacerbated her mobility challenges.) Amazingly, I did see people with walkers and dogs crossing 1st Ave S, so the local residents are making do with it. But I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to. The bus stops also had no bench or shelter, and the 131 (the closest route) is almost always 10-15 minutes late.
I did walk to elementary school and had sidewalks. I would have been bused to junior high, and walk again to high school, but I chose different schools and rode Metro to them.
The AFH I chose is in Lake Hills. The residential street doesn’t have a sidewalk, but moving cars are so sparse and slow (like the street I grew up on) I don’t worry about that. I didn’t know any part of Bellevue lacked sidewalks. 156th and 164th there have partial sidewalks, so it’s a bit of an ordeal crossing the street, but not nearly as bad as 1st Ave S or Evan’s example. 156th even has a few intersections with flashing pedestrian beacons, which I use. That’s what 1st Ave S needs at minimum!!! But the difference seems to be that Bellevue has money and Burien doesn’t, so Bellevue installs pedestrian beacons and Burien doesn’t.
Seattle has a very low percentage of households with children–reportedly the lowest in the USA. That fact means that the schools have to expand their boundaries if they want to maintain the minimum number of kids per school. Seattle did try to close a number of elementary schools, but that initiative was met with much resistance and subsequently abandoned. The 400 number is the minimum number of students to staff the building with full-time nurses, librarians, special-ed services, security staff, food services, etc. When the number of students drops lower, the support staff is cut back and some classrooms may be composed of multiple grades (3rd and 4th grade in one classroom.)
I spent some time in Orlando this summer and sidewalk infrastructure is very limited there. Many streets in the area I was staying have sidewalks on only one side of the street and often the sidewalks are built to resemble goofy, meandering streams instead of straight pathways.
Seattle closed schools in the 80s or 90s but then the child population rose again in the 2000s and it had a shortage.
Also, about 23% of all K-12 students in Seattle are attending private schools. The WA state average is 10% of K-12 students attend private schools. Many of the private schools aren’t neighborhood schools and require a longer commute for their students.
I dug a little deeper to see what I could find about the number of elementary schools. I ran across this site which demonstrates how the number of elementary schools radically reduced between 1929 and 1970. It hit a low in the 1980’s and now slowly increases as our country’s population increases. For example, there were 160K elementary schools in the use in 1945 (down from 238K in 1929) and it shrunk to under 60K by the early 1980’s (before now gently riding again). All of this has been at a time when national population growth has been significant.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d00/tables/PDF/table087.pdf
The reason I mention it is because most neighborhoods that had smaller, more walkable elementary schools tended to originate before the 1950’s. The current elementary school model that evolved starting back then radically increased the number of students per school with lots of additional admin staff and group facilities (larger play areas and more common spaces).
So the localized, small elementary school attendance model that existed 100 years ago hasn’t been changed to what evolved ending about 40 years ago.
Al S.
Seattle schools are financially underwater currently and it’s just getting worse. The District needs to close a whole lot of schools for financial reasons and it’s finding politically impossible. https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-school-closure-plan-is-dead-for-now At some point a bunch of schools are going to have to close… but like Sound Transit, the Seattle school Board also doesn’t live in fiscal reality.
As far as picking kids up from school in car, I’m not sure if most posters here understand what life with a job-spouse-children-house life even looks like. I’ve rode plenty of transit in my life, and I’ve encouraged my family to do the same… but there just is no way to make multiple stops at say, work,–daycare–grocery store–home riding transit. There’s only so much time in day. The big reason transit doesn’t get much traction in the US is many guys (including a majority of dudes in Seattle) will not take transit no matter what. Women are much more transit friendly by and large, but get stuck with childcare and shopping and actually need to drive.
“As far as picking kids up from school in car, I’m not sure if most posters here understand what life with a job-spouse-children-house life even looks like.”
I don’t think many parents today can fathom that many elementary school children 60 years ago used to walk to and from school with other kids that lived nearby — and not their parents.
“I’m not sure if most posters here understand what life with a job-spouse-children-house life even looks like.”
I’m not sure if one poster here understands what families in the Netherlands do. Often the kids bicycle to school, parents bicycle to errands and maybe even to work, and elderly grandparents bicycle to errands. Or they take the metro, trams, or buses. Or a combination of them. Who needs a car? The Dutch had public demonstrations against cars killing children in the 1970s, and demanded better non-car infrastructure.
Naturally people here don’t have as many of those options, but the point is we could build them (especially the low-cost ped/bike infrastucture) for less than it takes to persistently deny we need them, for decades after decade.
If you look at Bellevue, largely developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and really up to about 1970, its actually noteworthy how integrated elementary and middle schools are into the neighborhoods in much of Bellevue. Churches too. Thats certainly a lot later than one would assume, typically assuming the break would be WWII – appears to be a later phenomenon at least locally.
“Women are much more transit friendly by and large, but get stuck with childcare and shopping and actually need to drive.”
In the 1930s, this might have been the case. These days, both adults in the family usually have jobs. “Latchkey kids” that let themselves in after school were pretty common starting in the 1970s. I was one of them. There was nothing like the mass mile long lines of parents cars clogging the streets around schools as happens now.
Errands and other life necessities is a perfectly good reason why parents shouldn’t waste an hour of their day stuck in a pointless traffic jam at their kids school. There are better things to do.
When I moved to far east Bellevue in 1973, I thought our house was 1-2 years old and my elementary school had long been there. Recently I found out it was the opposite. The house was built in the 1950s (the first generation of modern split-levels I guess), and the school had opened in 1971. All the kids walked to it.
It wasn’t small; it had some 400 students. Six grades, each in an L-shaped room containing three 20-student classes. A kindergarten room, art room, music room, staff rooms, and in the middle, an open-plan library called an “LRC” (Library/Learning Resource Center). A cafeteria/gym/assembly building. On the back and side were an asphalt recess space, ballfield, and undeveloped field. In front, a parking lot. School buses were available only beyond a mile or two.
Most of the other elementary schools I saw then were older, and each room was separate, smaller, and on an outdoor walkway. I assumed that was the 1950s style. I don’t know how big the entire schools were or what other facilities they had.
Glenn in Portland,
Crime and homelessness certainly play a pretty big role in not letting your kids walk to school. Every school in south Tacoma has homeless people asking kids for money…. or worse yet, to buy weed for them at the numerous pot shops.
As a long time school volunteer, I can tell you that kids that get a ride to school are better students than kids who walk to school, by and large. Those traffic jams are maybe 25% of students? Then there’s the 25% of students whose parents not only don’t give their kids to ride to school, but don’t give a shit if they even go. As far as schools are concerned… driving your kid to school is a good thing… higher class of student.
For the record… I never drove a kid to school even if they asked me too 50 times. I don’t know what I’d do now….
Seattle does a pretty extensive job determining how students get to and from school. For those interested in a specific school the data is here:
https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/safety-first/safe-routes-to-school/student-travel-survey#2024studenttravelsurveyresults
It appears that just under half of the students are driven — with walking and bicycling in the 30 percent range. School bus riders take up much of the remainder.
I’m rather surprised that bicycling is so low. Why is that?
“Every school in south Tacoma has homeless people asking kids for money…. or worse yet, to buy weed for them at the numerous pot shops.”
No they don’t dude. I live in the South Tavoma area and there’s no homeless begging for money in front or near the schools. And the pot shops aren’t evem anywhere close to the schools in the first place so you’re just fearmongering for the sake of fearmongering at this point. Like get your facts straight before making knee-jerk assumptions.
I’m rather surprised that bicycling is so low. Why is that?
I think there are several reasons. Think of how little kids walk to school. Some walk with their parents. Sometimes an older kid will walk them. You can do all that with bikes but it is generally harder to pull off.
Just to back up here, The district will only run buses if you are relatively far away from the school (one mile for elementary, two miles for middle school). They don’t run school buses for high school. This means that a lot of the kids that are getting themselves to school are either in high school or they live relatively close to the school. For the latter, walking is often just as easy. Then, of course, there are the hills. I see a lot of kids walking to Jane Addams and Nathan Hale from Pinehurst. Addams is an all-city draw, so that means even though Hazel Wolf might be closer there are students who make that trip. Thus someone making a trip like this can walk or bike. I think most kids would rather just walk.
Walking is also more flexible. A lot of kids have after school activities that are not very close. So a parent picks them up at school and drives them there. You can do that with a bike but that is more of a hassle. But this sort of thing helps explain the relatively high rates of driving. One parent drops the kid off at school in the morning before heading to work. Another parent picks up the kid after school and drives them to their piano lesson. It is often a mix as well. Maybe a kid regularly walks to school but every Thursday they get picked up.
The relatively high rate of driving reflects the general state of transit. Not only in terms of getting to high school (which isn’t as good as it should be) but also both parents and students getting to places other than school. If you are taking the bus to work then you are more likely to just walk your kid to school. If your high school son can get to choir and back home easily using transit then he can put off learning how to drive. The same is true for biking. If the bike network was better (and we had fewer hills) then more students would bike to school.
Helmet hair is also a big deal. Especially for high school students. When my wife wasn’t looking, I looked the other way on a helmet for my son’s in-neighborhood low-risk ride to school, because otherwise he wouldn’t ride, or would often be late if he walked.
As the prices of small houses and condos rise faster than large houses, people with large houses find it hard to downsize.
Thanks Mike Orr,
It’s very easy to become real estate rich in the US without any easy way to turn that “real estate” wealth into useful income without paying a huge tax burden.
Although I really don’t believe people buy a house and suffer though 30 years of payments to move out of the damn thing… even if it’s too big and needs a new roof. I think the story of Seattle (and all of California) is how home owners really like where they live and don’t want changes in neighborhoods they’ve invested time and money in. I know it sucks to be on the outside looking in, but that’s been the story for the last 30 years.
Letting homeowners sell property and pay zero local or State taxes would help the housing market. Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
“I really don’t believe people buy a house and suffer though 30 years of payments to move out of the damn thing”
That’s literally what the article is about. If you can’t get past the paywall:
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Brenda Beeson loves her house… in South King County…. Ever since her husband unexpectedly died in 2018 and her daughter moved out, four of the home’s five bedrooms sit unused. The stairs, which once frequently creaked with footsteps, are now simply a barrier to the disabled woman’s bedroom. She’s drowning in bills. Maintenance for the big house, bought two decades ago, is piling up….
Beeson is ready to give it up for a smaller place. But that’s easier said than done.
People like Beeson, who secured homes years ago in fast-growing places, such as King County, have benefited from skyrocketing house values. But that doesn’t make downsizing automatically affordable — or, at the very least, easy.
High housing costs and interest rates have people feeling trapped in their homes. Even if someone owns their house outright and cashes out, that money doesn’t go as far as it used to — homes in Seattle are some of the most expensive in the nation, and the price gap between small and big homes is shrinking.
the result of staying put is an additional strain on the overall supply, especially for large houses in King County.
Beeson doesn’t want to contribute to that problem, but she’s unsure how to escape it.
She lives on disability and Social Security after mobility issues forced her to quit as a special-education teacher. She worries she won’t qualify for a mortgage and that selling her house wouldn’t yield enough to purchase a decent home in the area near her daughter, who cares for her.
Until she figures out a solution — a renter, hopefully — she’ll continue putting nearly three-quarters of her income into her housing costs.
Aaron Kamp’s five-bedroom Seattle home is about to be too big for his family now that he and his wife are soon to be empty nesters. It’s 3,100 square feet of maintenance, cleaning and taxes. Although they would like to downsize, it doesn’t make much financial sense….
Eleanor Payne, 51, knows that feeling. Each of her three children recently moved out for college and left behind empty bedrooms. Her home feels larger than ever.
“We feel we have a responsibility to our community to not take up so much space,” she said. “It feels environmentally irresponsible to occupy more space than we need.”
She crunched the numbers. Downsizing would be a squeeze. Her current interest rate is 3%, and she’s still paying off the mortgage after buying in 2020. The profit from her house wouldn’t be enough for a desirable home. “It’s difficult for working people to make a cash purchase, especially people with three kids in college,” she said. “We’re hemorrhaging money elsewhere.”
Like many surviving spouses, Beeson’s situation is less about disappointment with her options and more about the fear of jumping into a financial decision that will leave her worse off. The idea of moving is especially daunting to her, but so is the idea of staying…. She still has $150,000 left to pay off on her home, she said, and believes the condition of her home is too poor to help her buy her next home without another mortgage. “In this market, even if I wanted a 1,200-square-foot house, I’m still looking at $500,000,” she said. “I’m not going to net that much from my house. … Since my husband died, the house is falling down around my ears.” This month, there were only four detached single-family homes in her area listed on Zillow for less than $500,000, one of them being an old dentist’s office with barred windows.
“””
The answer isn’t to remove the tax burden. 500K in untaxed is huge enough. It’s a massive gift to the ownership class with no comparable break for renters.
The answer is to remove the tax loophole of the stepped-up cost basis that allows all that accumulated wealth to evade taxation.
Cam Solomon,
“Ownership class” ? Really? Owing a house doesn’t kick you into the “1%” or whoever you want to blame for the way things are. Other countries might do some things better than the USA, but this nation has made buying a home pretty damn easy…. it’s harder now, but we’ll figure it out because that’s the gold standard in America. “A Nation of Renters” would have to be the worst campaign slogan ever.
The average house in the USA is something like $425,000. The average retiree’s medical expenses (after insurance and Medicare) is around $170,000 until death. If you’re 70 and in bad health, that million dollar payday of selling the family home won’t really make you rich in any reasonable way if that’s all the money you have. Letting seniors off the hook on taxes for sales of under 2 million might release a bunch of houses to the market. It also is the right thing to do for seniors. Seattle already has enough homeless old duffers!
Mike Orr,
I read the article earlier without a paywall. some of it was good, some of it was total bullshit. It’s hard to feel bad for 51 year old yuppies with 3,000 sq ft homes and a 3% mortgage they don’t want to part with. It’s easy to feel empathy for seniors with health problems and a house they can’t afford to keep up. One of the strangest things that’s happened in the last 30 years is people of means, like the yuppie families in the article, actually believe that they’re somehow lower middle class or being financially put upon.
One thing about the ST article misses is that even if the homeowners in “financial distress” did actually sell their home, nobody with a moderate income is going to live there. I’ve watched much of the Greater Seattle construction industry move from building stuff that middle class people could afford to building for the upper classes only. Seattle joined cities like NYC and San Francisco as places where only the upper income folks can thrive. When a home in Seattle sells, the majority of the time the new owners are more well off than the sellers, or at least “on par” with the sellers. In the past, real estate was the easiest way to move up for lower income folks.
https://columbusunderground.com/linkus-major-bike-projects-funded-new-brt-videos-released-bw1/
Columbus (Ohio) is building 2 new brt lines. They are planning on building the
1) west broad brt next year
2) east main brt in 2027
It’s pretty exciting more and more cities are building brt lines
Thinking of all the times I needed a car, or couldn’t do things because I didn’t have a car and wouldn’t use a taxi, or the 1-way transit trip was inordinately long (1-2 hours), 99% of them were due to inadequacies of the transit network that wouldn’t exist in a state with comprehensive transit. Less than 1% were because I needed to move furniture or luggage or a carful of Costco items that were impossible to carry or take on a bus, rides home from medical surgeries, etc.
Yeah, I think I mentioned this in another comment thread. I both live and work on the west side of the city (Ballard and South Georgetownish respectively). That means that Link isn’t an option for me, and the buses are slow and circuitous as they circle Elliott Bay.
What’s a 25-35 minute commute by car door-to-door is a 90-120-minute bus ride each way, and since I have the option to drive, I’m not about to opt for an extra 3 hours off every day sitting on the bus as it winds its way through Georgetown, SoDo, Downtown, SLU, Westlake, Fremont and Ballard.
I sincerely wish it were different, though.
Does anyone know on here when the route 2,12, and 13 will return to being trolley routes?
The 12 is waiting for Metro to fill in a 1 1/2 block gap of wire between 15th & Pine and 16th & Madison on its new route. Metro’s 2026-27 budget (which we haven’t written about yet) has a project 1134275 to implement it (for $2 million).
The current Metro trolleybuses have battery backup so they can go off-wire for a mile or two, but Metro has been reluctant to use it in regular service for some reason. I think it’s planning some big decision on off-wire policy someday, but who knows when.
I didn’t know the 2 and 13 are dieselized, and I don’t know why they would be or when they might return. There are several projects in the budget related to maintaining and improving the trolley network in general, so I don’t know if they’d fall under that. The 12’s dieselization was a specific consequence of the RapidRide G restructure a year ago, which moved the route. The 2 and 13 may be dieselized because there’s construction somewhere along the route; that’s the usual reason. Project 1144093 restores the trolley infrastructure on the 70 that was removed for the 520 highway renovation.
I think the county council passed the budget, and it’s just waiting for STB staff to have time to fully analyze it and write it up. So hopefully we’ll have an article on it soon. There are a lot of things in it. I highighted 12 interesting “DS” items (operations & security) and 20 capital projects in my quick look through it. So stay tuned.
Oh, I think there’s something at the 12th & Madison intersection in the G construction that threw off the 2’s trolley infrastructure, and that threw off the 13 because the 13 and 2S are through-routed.
Yes that’s exactly the problem. Central Area folks have been working with Joy Hollingsworth’s office to try to get answers from SDOT and Metro on what is going on. 2 is not only dieselized but also on a reroute, with no ETA on fixing either issue.
oh city nerd is back from Phoenix? I guess that settles the argument about biking feasibility the in hot climates which we keep getting told it is not a big deal because….the Dutch bike in temperate weather
Hey lives in Albuquerque. I rode pretty much every day for 5 years when I lived in Albuquerque. It ain’t Phoenix. That’s a killing heat. Albuquerque is a mile high and much more temperate. It definitely requires a bit of acclimation coming into the summer, however.