Orphan Road

Or, at least, "revising neighborhood plans" to accommodateTOD:

With Sound Transit's light rail line from downtown to the airport scheduled to open next year, the city is feeling pressure to increase station-area development in southeast Seattle. Thus, the draft legislation targets communities around three southeast Seattle light rail stations to update their neighborhood plans first: North Beacon Hill; North Rainier (Mount Baker at McClellan Street) and Othello (Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Holly Street).

"We're looking at the town-center idea and asking, how do we create the kind of communities (at light rail stations) that neighborhoods have identified in their plans?" said Diane Sigamura, director of the city's Department of Planning and Development, which helped craft the measures with the Department of Neighborhoods and the Mayor's Office.

Zillow's housing sale data for Q2 2008. Darker, bluer colors represent steeper declines in home value. Notice anything? Home prices have held their value better the closer you get to the city. It's uncanny.

(via Seattle Bubble)

Finally, the chattering class in Washington DC is making the connection between climate change, transit, and land use patterns:

In their recent book, Growing Cooler, Ewing and four co-authors calculate that if the number of miles we drive remains constant, the increase in fuel-efficiency standards Congress mandated in 2007 would cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions from cars and trucks by nearly one-quarter through 2030. But, in fact, they project that emissions won't decline at all over that period, because an expected increase of nearly 50 percent in miles traveled will offset the efficiency gains. The same dynamic could prevent better fuel efficiency from reducing our reliance on foreign oil. "If we don't change the way we live, the way we build our communities ... we are going to fall way short of our goal of energy independence," says Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

Following up on Matt's post below, it's worth linking to the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. This got some play in the blogs a few months back. Here's a map of "affordable" Puget Sound, if you only consider housing costs:

And here's the same map of affordability when you look at housing and transportation costs combined:

Take a few minutes at the site and play with the tool. You can make all sorts of fun graphs taking into account gas prices and more.

It's been argued that rail is a "19th century technology" out of place in 21st century cities. While I find this argument absurd on its face (walking and bicycling are also "old technologies," but still quite useful), it may not even make sense on its own absurd terms.

Consider this article in The New Republic on how big American cities like Chicago are looking more and more like 19th century Paris and Vienna:

What would a post-inversion American city look like? In the most extreme scenario, it would look like many of the European capitals of the 1890s. Take Vienna, for example. In the mid-nineteenth century, the medieval wall that had surrounded the city's central core for hundreds of years was torn down. In its place there appeared the Ringstrasse, the circle of fashionable boulevards where opera was sung and plays performed, where rich merchants and minor noblemen lived in spacious apartments, where gentlemen and ladies promenaded in the evening under the gaslights, where Freud, Mahler, and their friends held long conversations about death over coffee and pastry in sidewalk cafes. By contrast, if you were part of the servant class, odds were you lived far beyond the center, in a neighborhood called Ottakring, a concentration of more than 30, 000 cramped one- and two-bedroom apartments, whose residents--largely immigrant Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes--endured a long horse-car ride to get to work in the heart of the city.

I do believe that, in a large sense, many people who are leaving Seattle's "inner city" (i.e. the Central District and the Rainier Valley) to move out to, say, Renton, Tukwila, or Federal Way are moving up, and doing so intentionally and in search of a better life.

By way of comparison, 100 years ago, Seattle's Jewish community was centered around 14th and Yesler (IIRC, the Langston Hughes Arts Center at 17th and Yesler was originally built as a synagogue). Over time, that community left the Central District and moved South and East towards Seward Park and Mercer Island. Today's Vietnamese and African-American communities are treading much the same path.

But, of course, the big difference here is $4/gallon gas. "Moving on out" doesn't have quite the same appeal. So, we have to be creative about giving people the opportunity to live the American dream, while at the same time making sure no one gets "stranded in suburbia."

Yes Dan, these people really do live on another planet.

What boggles my mind sometimes is how some of the people who live in the vast swaths of single-family, auto-oriented Seattle fail to see the benefits of upzoning around their area. There are large tracts of Seattle where one cannot walk to a coffee shop (let alone a grocery store, bank, or dry cleaner). The reason for this is that the density in these areas is supremely low. When we upzone MLK around the stations, suddenly these businesses become viable, and lots of single-family homeowners in the surrounding neighborhoods have all sorts of amenities within walking distance.

The piece about schools is totally puzzling. Southeast Seattle is quick to raise hell when the School Board threatens to close their schools. Wouldn't more students in the area make school closures less likely?

To be sure, I sympathize generally with the plight of Southeast Seattle. As the least wealthy quadrant of the city, it tends to end up with the short end of the stick far too often. So I can see how this beleagured, constantly-under-assault mentality develops. But, as I noted above with respect to schools, increasing the area's density is likely to give them more clout, not less.

This is brilliant:

Interesting chart, via Ezra Klein, on relative densities of major cities around the world. When folks like me talk about increasing density in the Seattle metro area, we're talking about going from Houston-like levels to maybe, maybe Stockholm- or Berlin-like levels.

I'm sure there are issues with this chart and the methodology (Is Barcelona really 4 times denser than New York?), but the point is that, relatively speaking, we don't have to increase density by all that much to see significant benefits in transit use and energy conservation.

Update: Speaking of Stockholm...

Brian notes that the Seattle Streetcar ridership is up, especially during peak travel times. Still, there are no doubt plenty of off-peak runs that are empty or nearly empty. But if you read Krugman today, that's not necessarily a bad thing:

Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

Atrios comments:

Obviously it makes sense to focus spare mass transit dollars on population centers, but it also makes sense to change the way we think about mass transit and not have those dollars be so sparse. Development corridors could incorporate mass transit from the beginning, at the very least with right of ways preserved and zoning around planned station locations in anticipation of what is to come.

The Seattle Streetcar, for all its faults, is the rare public transit investment that anticipates future growth by trying to do exactly that. Of course, spurring infill redevelopment is not the same as opening up new land for development out in the hinterlands. But it achieves a similar goal.

[Central Link is similar, but mostly along MLK. When you take into account the full, envisioned Link to Northgate and the Eastside, it's more about serving existing communities than trying to spur redevelopment.]

PS: I like Krugman's column title, "Stranded in Suburbia." People tend to associate auto-dependent lifestyles as somehow more "free" than transit-oriented ones. But that's obviously only true as long as you can afford to keep filling the tank. Otherwise you're... stranded.

Thinking about the two posts I did last night, linking to the New York Times and the Financial Times, it occurs to me that we may have actually turned the corner in this country with respect to land use and transportation planning.

I've been ranting for a while now about the connection between land use patterns and energy consumption, but for a whle it seemed like shouting into the wind, especially as national politicians talked about how some magic pill like ethanol was going to solve all our problems. Lately, though, it seems like the connection between land use, public transit, energy consumption and national security is finally starting to gel in people's minds.

It's going to take a generation or more to slowly re-shape our cities to accommodate a world of expensive oil and gas, of course. And even in 2008 highway funding dwarfs transit funding. But I can't help but get the sense that, after the ethanol miracle failed to deliver, people are finally getting serious about the idea that we need to approach the end of cheap oil with a holistic effort to change the way live and move on the planet.