Category: Orphan Road

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m a bit late to this, but I wanted to call out this CD News post on a potential re-route to the 3/4 that Metro is apparently studying.  As someone who spends a lot of time on the 3/4, I’m certainly in favor of anything that makes it more reliable.  What makes current service so spotty is the traffic entering and exiting I-5 at James St.

Thinking about this, and the situation I mentioned earlier with the 2 being delayed by people entering I-5, serves a as a good reminder that there are just too many damn I-5 entrances and exits downtown.  I know this isn’t a revolutionary observation, but it’s true.  We put way too much of a priority on getting on and off I-5 and not enough on connecting the streets on either side.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

And the winner is: “Seattle Tunneling Partners”  (whoever that is) with a bid within 0.02% of the maximum and a grade of C- (losing bidder was also within 0.02% of the maximum and had a grade of F). 

The Slog has the only coverage I’ve seen so far, but there will be more… oh yes, there will be more.

Update: WSDOT has published their contract award process (PDF here).  Bidders can win by either submitting the low bid or receiving a high enough score (each point reduces their effective bid by $1, up to $100M).  This actually gives us an insight into WSDOT’s priorities:

• 10% management
• 20% schedule
• 20% increasing roadway clearance inside the tunnel
• 40% boring machine design and ground settling plan
• 10% everything but tunneling (design of both ends, interior of the tunnel, cut and cover section, and operation building)

This means it’s far more important to WSDOT if you, say, increase the size of the tunnel bore than if you decrease the size and impact of the massive tunnel entrances. 

 Bidders were paid $4M each just for submitting responsive bids.  Not bad for a few months of work.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

If our cities density and economic strength were measured in tall skyscrapers, then we’d be failing. 

“America’s share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80 percent in 1990 to 18 percent by 2012.” (DJC, expensive registration required*)

So I ask: are we afraid to build tall buildings because of terror**?  Is it our weak economy?  Or is it thanks to businesses moving outside of cities thanks to sprawl?

* I haven’t even read the article, just the headline.  I might have time to swing by the library to read it at lunch.  If anyone wants to get me a DJC subscription, it would be my favorite xmas gift.

**I love to play the “afraid because of terror” card – will our grandchildren respect us like we respected the WWII generation?  I doubt it.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Erica Barnett says there’s been some great progress with the multifamily zoning codes.  A whopping 8% of the city’s land can now be developed without minimum parking requirements.  Lots of good stuff in there, be sure to click through to read the details.

This will only affect a small chunk of the city’s land, as Erica notes.  And given the current housing market and the supply overhang from the last boom, only a very small percentage of care-free rowhouses will realistically get built in the next 20 years.

Still, it’s a great start towards a more rational and diverse housing policy.  To those who are freaking out about it, keep in mind that the market will ultimately decide.  Developers are conservative.  If these houses suck and no one wants them, the developer will learn very quickly not to build any more.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Be advised.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Thanks to the Seattle Planning Commission for producing this report and, especially, the map above.  I don’t think any Seattle transit user in their right mind would oppose flipping a switch and turning this into a subway.

More prosaically, I want to call attention to the area I’ve highlighted in red.  When ST2 is all built out, this area — consisting of 9 distinct transit communities — will be served by just 2 light rail stops.  Yes, I realize that the First Hill streetcar will pick up a couple more.  Still… seems out of whack, given the population density of the area.

Just an observation…

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

LaHood gives money to three projects that will tear down their elevated highways and replace them with bike lanes and sidewalks. 

Oh wait, we’re not really tearing down our highway to build pedestrian and bike paths.  We’re moving our highway down to ground level, then adding a second highway underground at a cost of billions.  Never mind.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I like that Dan Bertolet’s thinking outside the box with the idea of a fee for private parking spaces, but I do agree with some of his commenters that you could get most of the way there just by raising the gas tax and eliminating mandatory parking minima in new developments, two things that I know Dan supports.

But if Dan’s simply trying to establish a leftward anchor for this debate, so we can then redefine the “sensible center” as being the two things I mentioned above, then I’m all for it!

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I just wanted to share a simple chart I’ve made using WA population data.  What does it tell us?  It tells us that our efforts to channel growth into reasonably dense urban environments are failing miserably.

Notice:

1. Seattle is all but flat.  We set up restrictive zoning laws long ago, and have only slowly relaxed them.  Restrictive zoning acts like a big “Keep OUT” sign posted on our city.

2. King county is growing moderately.  This is generally good, as I’d rather have growth in suburbs than in exurbs.  But suburban homes are still terribly inefficient compared to city life.  Also, infill in a city means replacing parking lots with housing.  Infill in the suburbs means replacing trees with homes and fossil-fuel-fed lawns.

3. Check out WA as a whole.  This is bad.  Ideally we’d keep new construction limited to urban areas – Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, etc.  But compare this line to the example dense urban line (Seattle) and the example less-dense but still reasonably urban county line (King).  What you’re seeing here is clear-cutting trees and wilderness and building large new homes.  You’re seeing new roads to serve these new homes.  Along with new sewer systems, new electrical systems, water to keep the lawns green, landfills, schools, shopping malls, and transit-free road-based corporate campuses.  This is sprawl.  Green, natural WA is being paved to make way for sprawl.

I flew over WA today, and was discouraged by the number of new housing tracts set up in the middle of nowhere (many of them still undeveloped, just plowed and set aside for the next bubble).  Each of these new homes will have a worker that will drive for hundreds of hours a year to get to work.  They’ll drive hundreds more hours a year to go shopping, drop their kids off at soccer practice, to pick up dinner, etc.

If peak oil hits, most of those that live on that WA line above are screwed.  If it doesn’t hit (in the near term – it must hit sometime), then all of these people are driving global warming just by living their lives.

How do we fix this?  Dramatically relax our zoning restrictions.  Allow the market to turn our acres and acres of single family homes into apartments and condos.  People want to live in the city (if you believe prices are a proxy for desire), so let’s let them.  Sure there will still be those that want to live in the middle of nowhere.  And we should keep working on our growth management rules.  But our only hope of keeping Washington green is to make that Seattle line match the rise of the WA line.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Human Transit just posted an excellent graph, showing how strongly what country a city is in influences its use of public transit.

Why is the US so low on this graph?  It’s not like we’re comparing to Europe or Asia – this is Canada and Australia, the two countries most like the US that I can think of.  Jerrett believes it’s our decentrallized business parks.  I agree, but what caused those?  What makes the US so special when it comes to wanting our offices out in the middle of nowhere?  Surely urban land is more expensive than suburban land in other countries as well.  Is this yet another effect caused by our subsidized freeway system?  Or is this just a cultural effect, perhaps caused by executives wanting their work near their home?

In his post, Jerrett also mentions the power of the stick to get people on transit.  Sydney is up near Canadian levels partly because parking downtown can be $60 a day.  I propose that’s partly the reason the four US cities named are so high above our average.  They’re all geographically constrained, and therefore are difficult and expensive to drive to and park.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Josh Cohen at PubliCola looks at some numbers on city-by-city bike ridership and concludes:

But if Anderson’s numbers are any indication, Seattle would do well to put as much effort into education and outreach as it does into infrastructure. Given that Bellingham has almost double the percentage of people who ride bikes, with roughly the same number of miles of bike paths and striped bike lanes, it’s worth considering a well-funded and well-executed outreach campaign in addition to the city’s ongoing efforts to build more and better infrastructure.

A couple of points here.  First,I think it’s pretty hard to compare miles of bike paths between Bellingham and Seattle and look for any sort of meaningful relationship.  The density is different, the demography is different, the commute distances are different.

That said,  it’s probably true that putting effort into education will yield more riders.  Bicycle commuting is definitely a tipping point (or virtuous cycle) phenomenon: once more people do it, it becomes safer, so more people do it, so more bike lanes get built, so more people do it, etc., etc. Heck, it might even be worth it to pay a few people to ride, just to get the numbers up and get the cycle going (assuming that you believe, as I do, that bicycle ridership is a net positive for the city).

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Dear New London,

I know we’ve just met, and I’m leaving in a few days.  But I find criticism is easiest to take from strangers.  Let me be honest – you’re not living up to your potential.  You were built with all of the right elements.  You have narrow streets, a well planned downtown, wonderful history, narrow storefronts, beautiful buildings (ok, a few too many giant churches for your own good, but not the worst flaw to have), you’ve got a nice train station, a waterfront view, and you’re a major ferry stop.   But it’s clear you’ve let yourself go.

Don’t get me wrong – I know it’s not your fault.  You saw all of the other towns growing and getting rich.  However, say it with me, you’re not Mystic and you’ll never be Mystic.  It’s just impossible to compete with an 80’s movie starring Julia Roberts and a waterfront that isn’t cut off by a train.  But Mystic is shallow anyway, with it’s giant parking lot for the tour buses and its Disneyland-like renovated homes and sailboats.

I know you saw Mystic and believed all you needed was a giant parking structure of your own, and to widen your streets, and to tear down all of those buildings that weren’t so pretty and put in more parking.  But you were so close to perfect.  Now instead of beautiful old shops that are walkable, pedestrians can’t carry a conversation over the 30mph traffic flying by.  And parking lots have eaten up most of your downtown.  And instead of revising your zoning to let infill bring new buildings with new people to shop at your downtown you kept your old zoning rules.  Then you let in that condo where the first two floors are parking lots.  And to bring in some cash you were desperate for you let that developer put in that block wide concrete office building in the middle of downtown without any retail – just blank walls.

I hope you didn’t really think you’d lure drivers out of their cars by adding big parking lots.  How did that work out for you?   Did you intend to have your main street filled with porn shops and bars?  Are those new streetlight banners helping?  How about the security cameras?

But it’s not too late, New London.  Sure you’ll never approach the beauty of your namesake in my lifetime or perhaps a dozen lifetimes, but with a bit of work you can be a thriving city again.  Start with a serious road diet.  Yes, people want to cut through your downtown to get to the freeway, but that doesn’t help you at all.  I’ll let you keep that parking structure for now, but replace that block wide and five block long parking strip with human scale retail and housing.  Change your zoning just outside downtown to let homes be built close to one another and end your parking requirements.  Up your height maximums to four stories – you don’t have to be a suburb if you start acting like a city.

I wish you luck.  Call me if you find the willpower to change.

-Matt

P.S.  Ok, I took another trip to your city, and I have to give you some credit.  State Street looks reasonably nice.  It’s 2-way with slow moving traffic, which has resulted in some nice shops.  I also realized that you’ve suffered from the same state-inflicted torture as other cities, as the nearby freeway and bridge most likely created your perceived need of wider roads downtown.  But I urge you: ignore this freeway.  Put your road on a diet and don’t fast-track potential visitors right through your downtown.

(sorry about the off-topic post, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find parallel arguments about Seattle)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Google map based tool that uses census data to graph commutes.  One large flaw is that it assumes everyone drives, but overall it’s awesome.  Oh, and for some reason they chose not to support Internet Explorer (?!).

Play with this a while and all kinds of interesting trends pop out.  Compare “from” data in any Seattle zip code (try 98001) with a suburban zip code (try Bothell 98011),  and you’ll see a short commute with fat lines compared to a very wide range of commutes with spindly spider web lines throughout the region.

Via HumanTransit

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

This morning I planned on taking transit to the airport, my normal means of getting there.  But it turns out that Sunday morning service is terrible.  Searching at 5am for ways of getting to the airport, I found there was a bus at 4:10, and the next one wasn’t until 6:10.  “That’s fine” I say “I’ll just take a taxi to the bus tunnel”.  But then I look up Link hours, and they don’t start running until 6:20.  So a $45 taxi to the airport it is.

When I arrive at the airport, the drop-off area is packed.  We have to wait several minutes in the line to drop off along with countless other taxis.  I ask the driver about this, and he says it’s the same every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at this time when the cruise ships are in town, and continues until at least 8am.

I understand the desire to minimize costs by keeping the hours of service to those that are well used.  But that’s a whole lot of taxi trips that probably wouldn’t happen if we extended Link at least an hour on Sunday mornings.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

One last comment about this post on STB: it seems to have generated quite a comment thread discussing Seattle’s parks and whether or not we have any “real” urban parks.

There’s a lot of discussion in the thread about whether Seattle in fact has any urban parks, what counts as an urban park, etc. etc.  The various merits of Chicago’s Millennium Park and Seattle’s Discovery Park are discussed, along with ample digressions regarding their proximity to the city center.

I think what people are groping for here is a the idea of a park where many of the city’s residents can walk out of their apartments and go for a long walk or jog.  That’s what makes urban parks so special, that cognitive dissonance.  One minute, you’re in a multi-story residential apartment building, the next, you’re lost in a jungle for a while.  Sure, you can drive from your 1950s rambler in Crown Hill to Discovery Park, but you don’t get quite the same cognitive dissonance.  And you don’t get the same energy of all these other people enjoying the park with you.

Seattle will never have a large, forested urban park that’s walking distance from downtown.  That ship has sailed.  We had one last chance in 1995 with the Seattle Commons, and we voted it down.  C’est la vie. The closest thing we have that fits the leave-your-apartment-and-go-for-a-jog criteria is Myrtle Edwards (Capitol Hill parks are too small for jogging, and there aren’t enough apartments near the other parks to really qualify).

However, Seattle does have plenty of great parks, it’s just that few of them were constructed in that particular 19th Century era of Olmstead “City Beautiful” parks, where you try to showcase nature but at the same time tame it.  For example, we have Green Lake, with more and more apartments being constructed around it all the time.  Visit Green Lake on a nice summer day (remember those?) and it truly does have the energy of an urban park.  It seems far from downtown now, but in 50 years it will be less so.  We also have real urban parks that aren’t very big, like Cal Anderson.  You can’t jog there, but it does have the energy of a city park.  The more we try and enjoy the parks we have for what they are, the happier we’ll be.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Matin asks KC Metro about their bike sharing program:

How would you handle helmet laws?

The vendor would be asked to address the issue of how helmets would be provided. Most users would bring their own helmets; there would probably also be some type of system for checking out helmets.

Huh.  I don’t think I ever really thought about helmets in conjunction with bike sharing systems.  The odds of me remembering to bring my helmet in such a situation are quite low.  And the idea of checking out a helmet seems problematic for a number of reasons (reason #1: umm… ew?).  Perhaps this is why bike sharing is most successful in European cities where you can bike relatively safely without a helmet.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Via Human Transit.

When using these in your LEGO city, keep in mind that your LEGO mayor and LEGO city council are free to avoid any long, interminable debates about the benefits of bus vs. rail, since it looks like both vehicles have a peak capacity of about 5 passengers.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Steve Thornton gives his take on the future of Seattle’s Waterfront in a guest post at STB.  Money graf:

Show me instead how wide the storefronts are (25 feet max, with lots of 15s, 10s, even six feet wide spaces (a crepe window, a shoe repair shop). Show me where all the food carts are going to go, and tell me how you’re going to fill them with hungry young immigrants looking for a foothold in this economy. Show me where the sidewalk cafes go, and the street vendors. Make the streets as narrow as the law will allow, or amend the law to make them narrower, like Pioneer Square alleys. Pack it in, pack it in.

I agree, although I think this is a helluva challenge for a new development — such eclectic streetlife is more typical of older neighborhoods that have been gradually revitalized.  It’s a process of laying on more and more stuff, decade after decade, that creates the beautiful urban cacaphony of a great city.

That said, I think the best possible outcome for the waterfront is that it becomes an extension of Pioneer Square. Not in terms of sports arenas per se, but as a mixed residential urban neighborhood.  Due to the difference in elevation, the waterfront will always feel disconnected from Pike Market.  Pioneer Square, on the other hand, is a short, relatively flat walk away.  You could imagine, as transit connections get better, the neighborhood growing north along the waterfront, with residential, nightlife, and office space.  Like South Lake Union, but more organic and with better views.

Even if that only gets you as far as, say, University Street, it’s still a pretty good outcome.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Recently, Jarrett Walker’s blog criticized Seattle’s bus map as an example of poor information design (see here and here).  I’m not a big fan of the map either, but it’s worth pointing out that Seattle does have a more well-designed frequent transit map (above), which you can find on Metro’s website here.

The frequent transit map is not perfect — it basically just assures tourists that if they want to go to the Space Needle or Pioneer Square there’s a bus that will get them there and back.  Still, it’s a start.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Obama to Call for $50 Billion Spending for Infrastructure – NYTimes.com.

Glad to see the administration getting serious about it.  I would have liked to see this proposed about a year ago, but better late than never I suppose.  Will it make it through the congressional grinder?  Not without some significant changes, I’d imagine.