By Matt the Engineer on September 15, 2011
I happen to own a copy of Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was several wonderful chapters in when I lost it, and only recently found it again (it was zipped away in the pocket of my suitcase). As I work through the other 4 books I’ve started, it has sat [...]
Posted in density, Urban Planning
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.
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* 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 February 19, 2008
Brian Bundridge recently put up an interesting post about our state ferries, and quite enthusiastically ends with the hope for more and bigger ferries.
Unfortunately, I fear he has underestimated the need for any link in a transportation system to be proportionally sized to the other links. For example, a larger boat needs deeper slips, better on-off ramps, larger holding areas for traffic, larger roads to carry away boatloads of cars, and more larger roads further out to handle more traffic. Moving traffic is a flow problem, not a mechanical problem.
Some projects currently planned or underway to handle this traffic include the Bremerton Subway (about $40 million) and the Belfair Bypass (current estimate about $37 million). Anyone traveling around here regularly could think of a *few* other places that could use some work, if moving cars is the goal.
But should that be the goal? Is it realistic to draw up a $400 million spending plan for big ferries and more roads when oil is looking to roost permanently over $100/bbl?
In a word, no. Spend some fraction of that amount putting in scheduled bus service in areas now served only by dial-a-ride, force the shipyard to put worker parking south of Gorst, work with the casinos to build passenger ferry patronage, and run passenger ferries at the same speed as car ferries with no premium charge for foot passengers. (A single-hulled 100-foot passenger ferry running at unity, i.e., ten knots, will take a half hour Bainbridge-Seattle, or an hour Bremerton-Seattle- using about ten gallons an hour of fuel. And no wake.)
It’s time to stop building roads and car ferries, and start thinking.
Posted in land use, smart growth, survey, Urban Planning
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