Posted Thu, Apr 19, 1:15 p.m.

I don't agree with jmrolls. I can tell because he has a clear line of thought from beginning to end, and he doesn't fall into messy logic traps that mislead me. (And I can have a coherent discussion by saying, "hey, your logic applies to suburbs more than dense cities! ...

Posted Thu, Apr 19, 12:53 p.m.

Roger Valdez has a different view of the world than I do. His writing does not help me understand that view.

Posted Wed, Apr 18, 3:36 p.m.

I'm really confused by Roger Valdez's article. It doesn't meet the standard that I've come to expect on Crosscut. "Poo poo" is not useful contribution to the discourse. You run the risk of distracting the community from a real problem. Certainly you have no idea if this project is a ...

Posted Thu, Feb 23, 7:32 a.m.

Of course, BlueLight, you're forgetting the real economic solution here. Turn the renovated wing into a pot growing operation. No need for heat lamps.

Posted Wed, Feb 22, 9:29 p.m.

Seriously tho, very cool. I hope the crow guy at the UW did a "before" study of birds in the area.

Posted Wed, Feb 22, 9:26 p.m.

Here's a new idea: get work parties of drunks and delinquent dads to farm it. (That's a history joke, folks.)

Posted Mon, Nov 29, 8:21 p.m.

Bravo. It took 6 tries at my password to get it right. Thanks for bringing me back.

Posted Sat, Sep 4, 10:54 a.m.

Crosscut: it's "Fujii", two i's. The mayor's nuts. I can't even tell what Marquardt is really asking for, there is no $, it's not clear what pot of money ($40 mill or the estimated $7 mill) they want to draw from. This doesn't make logical sense and it doesn't make ...

Posted Thu, Jun 24, 9:14 a.m.

@seattlelifer: The problem is a preoccupation with stories. Everyone loves stories, not just historians. Good stories are built on top of data, though. I think that creating data sets (scanned documents and photos; historic locations of streetcar stops; topographic details of hill and street regrades; demographics; etc) is the single ...

Posted Mon, Apr 5, 11:25 a.m.

I'd like to mention a couple of implications of my seemingly pointless historical anecdote. First, White Center would make an excellent case study in the economics of suburban sprawl. It started in the streetcar era and extends right into implications of GMA as woofer mentioned. Second, why did Seattle suddenly ...

Posted Mon, Apr 5, 10:34 a.m.

The Roxbury boundary is an essential part of the history of White Center. 100 years ago, everyone assumed that the Lake Burien area would become part of Seattle. It was a logical progression of massive annexations which had happened over the previous decade. "Old" Burien, White Center, and the commercial ...

Posted Wed, Mar 24, 10:32 a.m.

By the way, there is a very practical, important reason to name alleys. Public safety. I used to live in a neighborhood of Seattle whose name will to unmentioned to protect the innocent. There was a club in the alley behind our place which, on occasion, had brawls, riots and ...

Posted Wed, Mar 24, 9:03 a.m.

Bleh I wish there were an "edit" feature. :) "I can't think of any names in Tokyo..." And I meant "residents" at the end, not "residences".

Posted Wed, Mar 24, 8:57 a.m.

Thanks Knute! If you don't mind, I'll provide a case study from another place which can give us ideas on how to get naming right. I was interested at seeing "intersections" in Benjamin's list. You know, in Japan they rarely name streets. Instead, every signalized intersection is named in Tokyo, ...

Posted Tue, Mar 23, 6:06 p.m.

I think we need to have an active interest in naming things, and then like you said, wait to see what names are created organically. It would be a great UW anthropology or geography project to interview parties to see what the name of a place should be. Or for ...

Posted Thu, Dec 17, 9:40 a.m.

I agree that the difference in opinions and beliefs matter. And I agree that it's significant that King County voted so strongly when compared with particularly Eastern Washington counties. But the statement that Seattle or King County are "statistical outliers" only reinforces the idea that Washington is one (KC) versus ...

Posted Mon, Oct 26, 10:04 a.m.

This will sound either sacrilegious, as if I'm trying to block the project, or perhaps just that I want people to die, but why do we need shoulders in the tunnel? Padding the road with 12 feet of shoulders must add incredibly to the cost? Reducing speed like in the ...

Posted Fri, Oct 16, 12:20 p.m.

I was at the speech as well. I bused down in the name of sustainability. My bus back home from the biggest university in the region (UW) to the densest population in the state (Capitol Hill.. #2 now?) never showed up. The next one was 5 minutes late. I could ...

Posted Fri, Sep 25, 11:27 a.m.

My comment to John Fox is, "What if you're right?" Is Mercer really hunky dory they way it is? Is that why we've spent 40 years trying to figure out how to fix it? Is it hopeless to try and turn the armpit of the city into something nicer?

Posted Fri, Sep 25, 11:17 a.m.

I made a horrible mistake. I moved to South Lake Union thinking it was a neighborhood (I actually lived in Casccade). I didn't realize that it's really a network of highways whose purpose is to "most efficiently move traffic". It didn't take me long to learn my lesson. At first ...

Posted Fri, Sep 25, 10:47 a.m.

I feel dirty after reading dbreneman's post. Way to ruin my day with your psychosis.

Posted Fri, Sep 25, 10:28 a.m.

Making pedestrian malls is simple. Where you have too much pedestrian volume conflicting with cars, you take the cars out of the mix. The best candidate for Seattle's first pedestrian mall is Pike Place. It's assinine that cars are aloud to drive down that street on weekends, or during business ...

Posted Mon, Sep 21, 1:58 p.m.

It's weird that some people act like infill development is the greatest new threat to our neighborhoods. I don't think it's a threat, and it's certainly not new. Here's a 1957 example that I found by comparing Seattle Municipal Archive's Flickr photostream to today: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigerzombie/3939272416/ The unfortunate thing there is ...

Posted Fri, Sep 4, 10:23 a.m.

Mr Baker: Are you just bitter about not getting promised sidewalks, or is there a genuine safety issue on your street?

Posted Thu, Sep 3, 2:04 p.m.

I own two bikes. I am pro-bike. However, the logic of this article has a major flaw, saying that bicycle lanes and separate bike facilities are a prerequisite of having bicyclists. How many bike lane miles are there in Asia? Do you think the number of people who bike 2 ...

Posted Thu, Aug 20, 11:29 a.m.

Really interesting article, thanks for letting me wander around inside your head. Wouldn't the failure to pursue the Olympics be more akin to the Challenger disaster? Apollo 17 was an achievement, not a failure. I'm curious to find out what you think the last major achievement was for Seattle before ...

Posted Wed, Aug 12, 6:56 p.m.

@joshuadf: I've just stuck the URL in as text in the past. Ugly, but at least it can be copy/pasted. @walker: Well, my web searching hasn't revealed your source. Here's what I found about TOD in Minneapolis, my query on Bing was: minneapolis "transit oriented development" real estate http://www.nextstep.state.mn.us/res_detail.cfm?id=2217 Real ...

Posted Wed, Aug 12, 9:08 a.m.

Crap, I am hurting society by renting. I had no idea. Maybe I'll bow out now. @walker: If you ask 10 people what "transient" means, they'll say bum. If you mean renters, just say it. I grew up in a "detatched" single family neighborhood. (Architecturally, detatched just means individual homes. ...

Posted Tue, Aug 11, 4:37 p.m.

@walker: When you went home from the meeting, where did you discover that transit oriented development attracts transients? I'd love to see your source. Because it sounds much more fishy to me than the idea that higher end residential would sell at transit stations. All you've stated is opinion, where ...

Posted Tue, Aug 11, 7:54 a.m.

Great demographic info, and nice job setting the candidates straight. However, I'm a bit confused by all of the questions at the end... They make a good list of important factors in making a great city. But are they meant to be purely rhetorical or are you implying that Seattle ...

Posted Wed, Aug 5, 9:54 a.m.

Terms are definitely being misused. The far right use the word "liberal" when they mean "libertine". Rather than describing a push for equality and civil freedoms, they use it to describe amoral freethinkers. It's funny that the synonyms for libertine (sensualist, debauchee, etc) seem to better fit the wife-cheating "conservatives". ...

Posted Tue, Aug 4, 1:38 p.m.

@Wells: Don't you think that rational people would take Nickerson, Leary, (two-way) Mercer, or Denny from SR99 to Ballard? The waterfront route will have too much unpredictability with game and ferry traffic. I use Nickerson and Leary all the time to get to Ballard from Capitol Hill or South Lake ...

Posted Mon, Aug 3, 12:45 p.m.

mhays said, 'Plenty of people oppose the tunnel. But like Ross Perot supporters, they're all over the map once they name their personal solutions. There's no such thing as a "majority" opinion on this, even in Seattle by itself, let alone the whole close-in 99 corridor.' Very well put! Personally, ...

Posted Tue, Jul 21, 7:24 p.m.

@dn: So if you keep presenting the same topic to voters, eventually they'll cave in and say yes? Is that what happened with the monorail? If transit's main goal is to reduce congestion, Tokyo is a complete, utter failure. They solved the problem of through-put (get as many people to ...

Posted Tue, Jul 21, 7:54 a.m.

Wonderful! Somehow I feel that I'm contributing to the problem by typing about this from behind a keyboard instead of getting involved in something. A few thoughts: 1. This one's really important. Especially when we're comparing with international cities like Dublin, Amsterdam, and Mexico City. Many of the cities we ...

Posted Mon, Jul 20, 2 p.m.

Seattle has always compared itself to other cities, as joshuadf mentioned the original settlement's name was "New York Before Long". But there was a difference in attitude. I love the Seattle Evening Press article which was reprinted in the New York Times on September 8, 1889 as "Seattle Booms Herself." ...

Posted Thu, Jul 9, 10:24 p.m.

@Knute: Thanks for the great, honest look at the area. It's important to take a long, hard stare right now, to have something to remember and contrast to later. By the way, did you get speedwalking lessons from Bill Nye? Trying to figure out how you were doing 35 mph ...

Posted Thu, Jul 9, 9:40 p.m.

@art&jniles;: Thanks for the pointers to the Seattle Times article. I didn't run across it when I was looking for material. By the way, the link didn't work, but searching on the Seattle Times for the title John left got me there. It provides interesting back story, but isn't really ...

Posted Thu, Jul 9, 12:56 p.m.

@Sensible_Olga: Thank you, that's exactly my point! Maybe not every business owner feels that way in every neighborhood, but I certainly don't want anti-walkable-community folks to have a planning trump card. A few notes on the content of the article. I could be totally misunderstanding @Kent. But it sounds like ...

Posted Thu, Jul 9, 8:15 a.m.

Thanks for all of the comments! @Arties4453: That's back before my time, so I tried digging for Sound Transit documents online. I was amazed that I couldn't find any historic documents, even their original EIS. Shame on me for not going to the library, but honestly my point was that ...

Posted Sat, Jul 4, 9:33 p.m.

@Mr_Baker: Blame the automobile! Before cars, sidewalks were a luxury. That's why property owners would do Local Improvement Districts to put them in and raise property values. Suddenly it was like having a linear park! After cars, the roads that everyone had been walking and playing on were usurped. But ...

Posted Sat, Jul 4, 9:29 a.m.

I am absolutely against the core proposals in this article. First off, I am *for* walkability, and I served twice as chair of the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board. Second, I am *for* neighborhood retail, and the more local the better. I reward small businesses that meet my needs. The problem ...

Posted Fri, Jun 26, 8:08 a.m.

We can't have a county executive that ignores the basics (as you effectively outline), but we also shouldn't elect someone without the ability to affect regional political matters. With all of our local elections we also vote for our voice in regional issues. In particular, the King County Executive will ...

Posted Sun, Jun 21, 10:27 p.m.

Matt, I think you're on the right track here. Big block developments suck when they go edge to edge. A great contrast is the neighborhood-crushing senior housing that just went up at Denny and Fairview, compared to the permeable Alley 24 at John and Pontius a couple of blocks away. ...

Posted Thu, Jun 11, 8:32 a.m.

I'd like to tell you that the photo with the shiba being walked is crooked, but niceness won't allow me.

Posted Tue, Jun 9, 10:34 p.m.

@David Brewster: I got served! Way to call me out for uncharacteristically not following links. I thought the video was on the New York Times site tho because of context. @CP: My god! The pedestrian crossings are bad, aren't they? Dravus has walled walks on both sides, Emerson's convoluted mess ...

Posted Tue, Jun 9, 2:32 p.m.

I agree with David Sucher and MJH on this. I loved the Promenade Plantee, and I've been watching progress on the High Line. That's a total of two examples. I wouldn't trust folks to replicate them. The scale of the viaduct is totally different, and any argument at reuse needs ...

Posted Tue, Jun 9, 12:52 p.m.

I feel sad for folks who HAVE gone digital and still pay for satellite or cable. What a waste! I know many people who really just want to watch one or two sports, but end up paying a hundred bucks a month for all kinds of crap and the special ...

Posted Mon, Jun 8, 9:41 a.m.

This was unfortunately not a simple debate, so the split vote is no surprise. Personally, I'm happy they made the choice they did. If they went the other way, each of those people - in particular the 6th vote - would be emotionally scarred when the next jump happened. On ...

Posted Thu, Jun 4, 10:46 a.m.

@hacknflack: That was the serious proposal from wash-dot, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I thought it was a nutty proposal and probably would have fought it, but I'm curious about why it quietly disappeared (or maybe I just wasn't paying attention). I think there's a strong argument for making ...

Posted Mon, Jun 1, 8:09 a.m.

The mockup of the fencing doesn't look that bad to me, actually. The high cost must be because they're trying to do something that looks decent, not just chain link. I'm a little bit confused here, though. I thought that WSDOT was planning to move the pedestrians paths below the ...

Posted Fri, May 29, 9:57 a.m.

@jniles: Okay, I guess it's time for me to crack up the 2040 documents. it sounds like they are trying to address some of the ideas I threw out. I've been focused recently on our original metropolitan planning document, Bogue's 1911 Plan of Seattle. Thanks for pushing me into the ...

Posted Thu, May 28, 1:19 p.m.

@jniles, thanks for the link to Pisarski's report. It's thought provoking. Like we've been doing, Pisarski also speaks out against the suburb vs. city contrast, but then all of his statistics continue the false argument. Do we have a data problem here? Are demographics solely based on political unit, and ...

Posted Wed, May 27, 12:58 p.m.

Wow. I'm not trying to pile on here, but Wendell Cox is incredibly suspect. Thanks for the great links - I went to his article and then clicked through to the data about Japan that he refers to, it was put together by his consultancy. I was really struck by ...

Posted Tue, May 26, 3:41 p.m.

@jk: Can you say "sin tax" ;) Do you have any ideas on how to preserve character in Seattle, or do you think the whole effort is a waste of time? You seem to support only saving the things we care about right now (well, the things *you* care about ...

Posted Tue, May 26, 12:16 p.m.

What a great speech, thanks for sharing it with those of us who didn't attend. I love the Ivar's anecdote, it's spot on. Preservationists, rather than making formaldahyde immersed exhibits, need to find a way to make delicious jams and jellies. Make things relevent, sure, but if you don't make ...

Posted Fri, May 15, 11:43 a.m.

Richard: Thank you for responding in this forum to clarify and explain the council's intent. Rather than a central index, it would be useful to have a single portal into the various databases. The only databases I'm aware of and use are through the City Archives. Currently I have to ...

Posted Thu, May 14, 10:30 a.m.

It's odd that bus routes and bus ridership are considered a chicken-and-egg problem. Here's the thinking that got us here... People should ride the bus all over our county (great!). In Seattle, people already ride the bus, so problem solved (huh?). Next, let's spread our vehicle resources out to enable ...

Posted Thu, May 14, 7:38 a.m.

This conversation is being approached the wrong way by both sides. Think about trying to find a web page on the Internet with no guide. That's what the Seattle City Council is proposing. If you happen to know the URL for the site you're looking for, you might be able ...

Posted Wed, May 13, 1:54 p.m.

I love the idea of fir, alder and cedar as well. And we can do better with the waterfront than just making it a boulevard or "great street" with evergreens, like this one in Amsterdam: http://www.zombiezodiac.com/rob/ped/amsterdam/PICT0061%20800x599.jpg . I was very amused by the statement that every city needs a Tukwila...

Posted Wed, May 13, 1:11 p.m.

ngeranios, it's interesting how the user base for mass transit is oversimplified, isn't it? Like you mentioned, HSR to Vancouver and Eugene couldn't survive on tourism dollars, but that's how it's presented. There's a similar issue with light rail in Seattle, where there is an overwhelming tendency to only talk ...

Posted Thu, Jul 31, 12:42 p.m.

1911 rocked: I think you spent too long in the article on a myopic view of Seattle's transportation past, and too little time exploring the counterarguments to transit critics. I'll focus on Bogue's 1911 Plan of Seattle. I forgive you, by the way, because it's hard to get good information ...