While on the topic of Lower Queen Anne and South Lake Union Crosscut wrote up on the County’s plan for Seattle Center. It also hits on a street car running up from the waterfront through South Lake Union. Apparently, Sims wants to turn the Seattle Center into a sort of Central Park, with tons of green space and some rainwater capture system. Sounds nice, but it’s a waste of the space that is an awesome venue for important cultural festivals in the city. If Seattle Center is destroyed, where will Bumbershoot go? What will replace it? It’s already been handicapped by removing Key Arena from it’s possible venues.

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Today in the PI, there was an article about a community meeting in the South Lake Union/East Queen Anne Area. The article mostly discusses increased heights for buildings and includes this lovely map featuring the current street car line and the possible addition of a second street car:

Some of the article is just hilarious such as this quote:

Lamb’s friend, who is 39 and has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, worries about the neighborhood losing its small town feel. “I don’t think I’ll feel like I know everybody in the neighborhood,” she said.

You know where that “small town feel” is not being lost? Small towns. If you live minutes away from Seattle Center, you can’t really expect to know everyone in your neighborhood. This is a city after all.

Anyway, much of the rest is pretty interesting. They talk about bringing a new street car into the mix, bringing the existing SLU car up to the U-District, and increasing heights for current zoning from four-to-eight stories up to as many as 25 or 40! The whole plan is to bring people closer to their jobs, and to concentrate density in those areas best able to handle it. I do worry about the “Bellevue West” concept, where there’s an island of high rises and skyscrapers in the middle of a sea of single family homes and “neighborhood commercial”. Too much of Seattle is currently zoned for single family to seriously increase density to the level the mayor has called for in his long-term planning, and it’s still no where near the level required to increase transit ridership to the level needed to make a serious reduction in green house gases.

I guess the one flaut in my super pro-density thinking is removing single family zoning in the city would mean the demolition of the beautiful craftsman bungalows in those neighborhoods. This is less of a problem in places in the far north where most of the housing is post-war track rubbish, but in the places like Fremont, Wallingford, the Central District, Queen Anne and West Seattle, we’d be losing some seriously beautiful buildings. At least there’s a company who can move them.

This brings me to the next read in today’s PI, the idea of prefab lego-style apartments. Every so often there is a piece in some paper about prefab housing and boy are they ugly. The article calls them “the iPhone equivalent for housing”. Yikes. Modern because it hides the cheapness I reckon. I hope we don’t se them springing up all over town to replace those beautiful bungalows I mentioned.

Sorry long post. What do you guys want to see South Lake Union look like? What about other neighborhoods planned for more density such as Roosevelt, Interbay, Ballard and the Central District?

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… in Portland:

PORTLAND — The question comes as I’m whisking 55 mph on a standing-room-only light-rail train in this city’s west suburbs.

“What is wrong with Seattle?” It’s not me who asks it. It’s the woman next to me, Debby Fehrenbach, of Hillsboro, Ore. She is commuting 15 miles on Portland’s MAX electric light rail to her job at a Portland software firm.

Fehrenbach lived in Seattle for 25 years. She moved here two years ago. Part of the reason, she says, is because of how stuck Seattle is.

“I love Seattle, but I kind of gave up on it,” she says. “It’s a bus city. In Portland it’s so easy and fast to get around, you feel like you don’t even have to have a car anymore.

“Seattle really, really needs one of these.”

He points out a few of the really important parts of rail transit being different that bus transit. First, frequency:

It didn’t take more than two minutes for me to be impressed. That’s how long I waited to catch my first train in downtown Portland.

In two days of riding the rails, on 14 different trains, the longest I waited for one to come was eight minutes. That was at 11 on a Sunday night.

Anyone who rides a crowded bus knows about “bunching”, where no bus comes for a long while and two or three show up at the same time. That’s impossible with trains because they have their own right-of-way. So, the longest you wait is 8 minutes.

Next, boarding times:

The longest any of my trains spent stopped at a station was 25 seconds — even when 75 rush-hour commuters tried to board a crowded train at once. I’ve waited much longer for a single rider to get on a Seattle bus, fumbling for change or arguing with the driver.

Trains are flush-against the platform, buses are usually raised and slightly in the street. Buses have only two narrow doors, trains have two or three per car. Buses can only be paid for in the front, trains can be paid on the platform, and then boarding is instant.

Trains are faster:

The trains are surprisingly speedy. Well, not in downtown Portland, where they run on the street like streetcars. But outside the core of the city, on their own grade-separated tracks or in the medians of arterials, the trains routinely reach 40 to 55 mph. (Seattle’s system is slated to be faster than Portland’s, because none of it runs in street lanes. All of it is planned for medians, tunnels or elevated tracks.)

Because they are separated from car traffic.

Finally, Mr Westneat sums up the argument on prop. 1 nicely is his own way:

All I’m saying in this column is that if we build more light rail, we will love it. As Portland plainly does. It’s pricey. But it’s reliable, quiet and, when designed so the tracks aren’t right in the street, fast.

So maybe we’ll start acting like a big city and build some real rapid transit.

Or, maybe we’ll go on as “Seattle: Bus City, USA.”

Forced to forever face that awkward question from our smaller, smarter friends to the south.

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