By Frank on April 20, 2008
The Seattle Times has a front-page story on the changes light rail is bringing to the neighborhoods along MLK Way. It’s a fine read, but I wish it had dug a bit deeper into the underlying reasons why the neighborhood is changing.
Pivoting off of daijimin’s post on the subject, I think there’s a much more complicated story to be told here. We know that light-rail was a disruption, and that many of the Asian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood moved away because of construction. But much of that was going to happen anyway. And anyone who thinks those communities won’t thrive outside of the Rainier Valley has obviously never been to Renton…or Federal Way…or Lynwood…or…
The story of immigrants to America first living in urban areas and then migrating out to the suburbs as they prospered is almost as old as America itself. After all, New York’s Lower East Side is no longer a bastion of Italians, Irish and Jews. And as an Irish-Italian descendant of those immigrants, I’m glad they made their way out.
On the other hand, if they’d held on to the real estate, I’d be sitting pretty right now! Which gets us to the other side of the coin: if you believe, as I do, that the cul-de-sacs of today could become the tenements of tomorrow, then it’s problematic, from a public policy perspective, to consign the poor folks to the auto-dependent suburbs at a time when auto-dependent lifestyles are on the wane.
Still, the newly-middle-class still seem more interested in movin’ on out (to the suburbs) than movin’ on up (to, say, a deluxe apartment in the sky). And not just in the U.S. Thousands of gated suburban communitites are going up in China to house that country’s newly mobile middle class. It’s mostly those of us who’ve lived for a generation or two in the suburbs who want to try living in the city for a change.
All of this is to say…. it’s complicated!
Posted in i5, roads, soundtransit
By Frank on April 6, 2008
Controversial paens to the military-industrial complex aside, the underground light rail stations are going to be beautiful. The downtown transit tunnel, now that it’s reopened, is equally beautiful. Most transit systems have stations that are brutally efficient but not much fun to look at. Seattle’s, on the other hand, will be a truly amazing work of public architecture and public space of the kind that we have far too little of.
The combination of the light rail station and the new Cal Anderson park will be an urbanist’s paradise.
Posted in i5, roads
By Frank on March 14, 2008
Mike O’Neill rightly wonders if the Sierra Club is going to live up to its promise to support the next round of light rail. The club is still on the fence, apparently because park-and-ride lots encourage sprawl.
Let’s be honest: park-and-rides do, in fact, make it easier for people to mix cars and transit. But as Will says, it’s important to design with your users in mind. As long as you have to pay to park, you’re imposing a cost and letting people make a rational decision. And park-and-rides eventually facilitate denser, transit-oriented-development down the line (notice how all the parking lots in downtown Seattle are being developed). Finally, Seattle has chosen (for good or ill) to go down the path of most mid-sized American cities and decided to use basically one system for both intracity and intercity transit (ignoring Sounder for a moment). So park-and-rides are an inevitability as the system expands outside of the downtown core.
As always, one has to consdier the alternatvies, and I will be curious to see what Mike O’Brien at the club has to say on that at the forum Will mentions on March 20. Because it’s perfectly reasonable for the Sierra Club to be anti-light-rail, and they don’t even have to be advocating an alternative. They’re just an interest group with a singular mission: stop sprawl at all costs. That’s one angle, but it’s not the only angle.
But we as policymakers (yes, in the initiative-driven transit world, Joe Citizen is a policymaker) do need to weigh the alternatives. What, overall, is going to provide the best mix of decreasing fossil fuel usage, respecting the environment, increasing density, providing options to commuters, etc., etc. When you consider al the factors, ST 2.1 is a no-brainer.
Update: What Ben said. Habituating people to transit — even if only for part of their commute — is important in the short-term.
Posted in fares, i5, roads
By bgtothen on January 25, 2008
More will be coming tomorrow.
Posted in 20th century, Ford, global warming, O&M, roads
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