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 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 February 11, 2011
Several months ago I compiled some census data regarding WA, King County, and Seattle and concluded that the Growth Management Act is broken. Since then I’ve been pointing to this data from all over the Web. Today, someone helped me realize that my numbers may be misleading. They are correct, but too granular, looking only [...]
Posted in sprawl
By Matt the Engineer on October 14, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in sprawl
By Matt the Engineer on May 14, 2010
From a King County Metro presentation, this slide jumped out at me. The colored areas are regions with increasing population between 2000 and 2008. Anyone know why this is happening? My guess is: zoning restrictions + cheap morgages + more roads = exurban sprawl.
Posted in sprawl
By Frank on January 20, 2010
Vintage Seattle has a great postcard of 1970s Bellevue. Bellevue’s growth over the last few years is a good reminder of how much the region’s changed, and how much the center of gravity has shifted away from Seattle over the years.* In the 1960s, you could build a Seattle-centric transportation system. No more.
Ironically, despite greatly increasing its stature and urbanity vis-a-vis Seattle, Bellevue still seems interested in pushing transit out to the hinterlands, rather than have it run where people live.
–
* Obviously Seattle’s still the big dog, but in relative terms its unipolarity has declined as the rest of King County has grown in population.
Posted in regional planning, regional transit, sprawl, Urban Planning
By serial catowner on July 30, 2008
The recent problem with the Critical Mass ride points to some deeper problems with our “love affair” with the car. First and foremost would be the bias shown by the police and mainstream journalism. Initial reports described a driver terrified by an unprovoked attack that broke his windows, causing him to flee and “accidentally” hit some cyclists.
Those of us who have read the interviews, including those with the driver, now know this story was completely false- but there’s been no prominent retraction. The police quite obviously are trying to “take down” Critical Mass and using a credulous press as one tool to do so.
This is a big mistake. At the core of Critical Mass is an anarchist (and by “anarchist” I mean “intensely self-disciplined”) spirit that revels in revolution. They will love a challenge, and it’s hard to scare people who are accustomed to riding bikes in American traffic.
The Cascade Bicycle Club has weighed in with disapprobation for Critical Mass- according to Cascade, drivers should be gently encouraged to tolerate cyclists. One big problem with this theory- the driver of the car was formerly a bicycle commuter.
Any such discussion will include the guy who hates cyclists because they “run red lights- the laws are for everyone” and blah blah blah. But if the talk turned to cameras to ticket drivers who run red lights, the guy is against it, and, wouldn’t you know, has studies to prove that strict enforcement causes more accidents.
What we’re left to deal with is an institutional bias in favor of cars, and the fact that, behind the wheel, we do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, and sometimes profoundly regret. None of this, of course, would matter if the oilfields of Texas were infinite, and the laws of physics suspended so that global warming would not occur.
But in the real world, our “love affair” has turned into an ugly situation in which our mistress, the car, seems likely to ruin our marriage to civilization. Some years ago, possibly before you were born, Jean-Luc Godard took one look at this problem with a film called Weekend. It’s not as though we weren’t warned.
Posted in Apple, children, sprawl, Toronto
Sound Transit Latest News
Recent Comments