By Matt the Engineer on August 18, 2011
The tunnel debate is over. Long live the tunnel debate. This week’s vote may have settled the tunnel debate for now, but that’s no reason for anti-tunnel advocates to give up. No multi-billion dollar yet-to-be-funded-or-started project can be considered a done-deal until opening day. Consider the Superconducting Supercollider, which started off as a $4.4B project [...]
Posted in tunnel
By Matt the Engineer on August 6, 2011
Several Roosevelt neighborhood plan supporters are claiming that Roosevelt’s new zoning will triple the existing population within 1/2 mile of the new rail station. At first I was tricked – triple the zoning is at least a win for Seattle, and probably as much zoning as I would have asked them for. But some of [...]
Posted in density, zoning
By Matt the Engineer on August 5, 2011
The Seattle PI reports that the DBT will use quite a bit of energy – specifically 25 million kilowatt-hours per year. Running a quick calculation, that’s equivalent to 47,500 60W light bulbs burning all day long, every day. That’s like every single Seattlite leaving an extra non-efficient light bulb on for about 2.5 hours a [...]
Posted in tunnel
By Matt the Engineer on July 30, 2011
According to the BBC, the average new US home is 2,300 square feet, while the average new UK home is 818 square feet. Yet they seem to get by just fine in life. Let’s take a look at those numbers. First let’s compare two homes with the same weather conditions in somewhat cold region. Seattle [...]
Posted in sprawl
By Matt the Engineer on July 28, 2011
Let’s look at two buildings. In the winter, a condo complex is busy burning natural gas to heat up all of its 50 or so units. The condo is fairly efficient, but Seattle is a cold place and the building still uses a lot of fuel to keep people warm. Next door there’s a server farm. [...]
Posted in Data, density
By Matt the Engineer on July 28, 2011
SDOT is trying out new smart parking meters. Besides spitting out parking tickets, they also have maps and “wayfinding”. Now if we could only get them to dispense and recharge ORCA cards we’d really have something.
Posted in Uncategorized
By Matt the Engineer on July 22, 2011
In the US our streets started out slow and safe before cars existed, and have become increasingly dangerous. We’re lucky in Seattle in that much of our roads were built before modern road standards. These standards have pushed roads to be wider for visibility and to fit large fat fire engines, remove stop signs in [...]
Posted in cars, children, sprawl
By Matt the Engineer on July 13, 2011
It’s not the fanciest graph in the world, but it’s shocking. This graph is from Clark Williams-Derry’s ongoing series Dude, Where Are My Cars? Our state road building machine is kind of like an optimistic weatherman during a drought in Ethiopia. Just wait – any day now the rain will come. They’ve been building and building [...]
Posted in roads, WSDOT
By Matt the Engineer on July 6, 2011
One fator that often brings down the livelyness of a city is dead, empty buildings or vacant lots. Sometimes this happens because an owner is waiting for the right market to sell, or because of some legal issue that’s being worked out. There are many blocks near my office with no street life despite being [...]
Posted in downtown, economics, federal
By Matt the Engineer on June 9, 2011
Searching for a good definition of “human scale” with regard to street design, I came upon an unlikely source: an Oregon Dept. of Transportation document from 1999. It’s a great reference about how to take the noisy dangerous highway that runs through your town and turn into a comfortable pedestrian-friendly main street. One particular segment [...]
Posted in walkability, WSDOT
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