By Frank on October 2, 2011
Boston_to_Chicago_5436 by sbamueller Eric McCaughrin from the East Bay Bicycle Coalition puts together a list of ways that antiquated Federal Railroad Administration rules stack the deck against passenger rail in the US. US trains need to be almost absurdly heavy to withstand potential freight crashes. This results in slower, more expensive, harder-to-maintain rolling stock. Trains [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on September 29, 2011
Within the first few minutes of Urbanized, the new movie from Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, a voiceover lists the various forces that shape urban design, including architects, planners, zoning laws, and citizens. That last one is accompanied by a visual of an elderly woman ostensibly making a public comment at some sort of community input [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on September 21, 2011
Pioneer Square by pasa47 Mark Hinshaw has an interesting piece in Crosscut with the counterintuitive title, “Seattle is killing retail by requiring too much of it.” I encourage you to read the whole thing. I find myself nodding in agreement with his diagnosis of the problem: Seattle over-incentivizes street-level retail, and the result is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on September 13, 2011
I appreciate Roger Valdez’s straight-up acknowledgement that yes, there is “social engineering” going on in American cities: Yes, we are social engineers, but no more so thanRobert Moses and his followers, who built “free” highways and subsidized, auto-dependent single-family communities that ate up land, fuel, and energy for more than half a century. That kind of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on September 8, 2011
I’m glad to see that King County Public Health is talking up“healthy places to live” as part of its messaging: “we can work together to make sure everyone has the opportunity to move more with parks, sidewalks and bike paths in all neighborhoods.” Walkable, bikeable communities are a public health issue. There’s only so much [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on August 18, 2011
Well, I guess it’s all over but the shouting. Barring a major upset, Referendum 1 is going to be approved and the deep bore tunnel will happen. At least we’ll get a new waterfront out of it. I’m sorry we couldn’t convince our neighbors here in Seattle that this project was a poor use of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By joshuadf on August 8, 2011
I ran across the Austin Contrarian’s “Three strategies for driving families with children out of Austin’s urban core” when searching around for ways to use the Census 2010 Summary File 1 (SF1) for Washington, released this past week, which includes more detailed demographics down to the Census Block level. The regulations are of course different [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on August 3, 2011
Alaskan Way Viaduct 4 by Sean_Marshall When the decision came in 2009, somewhat out-of-the-blue, to replace the Viaduct with a deep bore tunnel, I was skeptical. Still, I realized that the State was holding all the cards here. Seattle could complain all it wanted, but at the end of the day it’s a State highway, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
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 Frank on June 29, 2011
Amtrak 505 by KDavidClark Having recently made the case for blowing up the long-range plan and starting over again on the Amtrak Cascades, let me offer some time to a more incrementalist vision. In the current Washington Monthly, Phillip Longman cites Cascades as a winning example of “not-quite-so-high-speed rail.” This principle is also illustrated by [...]
Posted in Uncategorized
Sound Transit Latest News
Recent Comments