Recently in What Drives It Category

As the screen name suggests, I walk in cities. I walk in Seattle, and in my neighborhood of Belltown - which is a real honest to goodness neighborhood. People live here, work here, play here. A lot of people, mind you. I walk every day, on sidewalks with many other people. I have walked many, many miles on hard pavements over (too many) years, and now my feet often hurt. Then I sometimes ride a bus or my bike, which is not so hard on the feet. Because I live in an urban neighborhood I can get where I need to go without having to invest too much heartache over transit and transportation issues. I do anyway. Walking is a transportation issue, and walking is a much better experience when there are fewer cars to contend with. (Disclosure: I do own a car.)

 

I'm not predicting mayoral choice. I don't know what we'll end up with as a viaduct replacement, although right now my bets are on the deep bored tunnel. I'm not a fan of big expenditures for new auto infrastructure. What I am in favor of, as a pedestrian, are fewer cars on the streets where I walk every day. 

When the eight viaduct replacement options (before the deep-bore) were being considered, every one of them failed on pedestrian/bike issues largely because they put more than 25,000 vehicles per day on too many downtown streets. The surface options generated worse numbers than the options with a bypass (new viaduct or waterfront tunnel). The 10mgb report is here. The surface hybrid option that was being considered in the end had several transit proposals to mitigate traffic, but there was still too much traffic. There would have to be even fewer cars for our downtown neighborhoods to be good pedestrian places. That could only happen if enough alternative transit options were already in place, or had funding for rapid implementation, which we know is not the case. Even the 1st Avenue streetcar is now considered "optional" because it has no funding.

The streetcar would be desirable for many reasons. It offers many people a better alternative to driving. It increases pedestrian usage (transit users are pedestrians). I know not all the business owners will agree, but a streetcar is very good for storefront businesses, and the streetcar plan that was proposed wouldn't have resulted in a great net loss of street parking. Funding is the problem. An LID (Local Improvement District) is probably not the best solution for a streetcar through Belltown. LID funding is good for an area that needs to be redeveloped, but we don't need more development pressures in Belltown. An LID would result in higher business rents and threaten the small businesses that make Belltown such a great neighborhood.

As a pedestrian I'm not concerned here with traffic mobility. Any option would still move sufficient traffic, fast enough, and we are moving towards a future where fewer people have to or want to drive. But in the meantime, it's the traffic numbers that greatly affect quality of life for people who live, bike or walk in downtown neighborhoods. Above a certain margin, traffic volume has a negative effect on pedestrian and cycling usage and safety, and on sidewalk and neighborhood life. Think sidewalk dining, seeing someone and stopping to talk, trying to have a conversation. Traffic volume and accompanying noise and fumes can make these things difficult and unpleasant; it's bad for storefront businesses for the same reasons. It's also harder to get across the street safely. For most of the affected downtown streets, that margin of acceptability stops at around 25,000 vehicles per day on any given street. The surface options put the numbers far beyond that on too many streets (many streets are already at or above that number). The traffic would still move, slower, yes. Yet quality of life is lost, people are discouraged from walking and cycling, and I believe that those things matter a great deal, especially where I live. Maybe that's NIMBYism - strange to think of that coming from a neighborhood with no backyards. To all of you who don't live in Belltown, or Downtown, or Pioneer Square - what would you do if all those cars were heading through your neighborhood? Those of us who live in urban neighborhoods accept certain conditions that come along with it, like coexisting with traffic - but should we just quietly accept anything that so reduces the current quality of life in Belltown?

Cross-posted to Inside Belltown 

Despite Igor's tongue-in-cheek (I think) claims, Belltown could be a great neighborhood. Monday the Bell Street Park was approved by the city council, which means that some of the Parks Levy funds ($2.5 million, I think) will be spent to widen one sidewalk to 26 feet along five blocks, putting in natural stormwater drainage systems (one of the best selling points for me), and getting local input for the design and features of each half-block of this linear park space. It also means reducing parking and having only one drive lane on five blocks of Bell Street. Per standard operating procedure, the media prompted businesses to make complaints about how loss of parking would drive away their customers. This really, really irritates me. I live in Belltown with thousands of other people who walk to these businesses and make up their daily supportive customer base, without which there wouldn't be so many businesses as amenities in Belltown. Yet their preferred customer, according to their statements to the media, is the one who drives from some other neighborhood and parks in Belltown because it's such a cool place to go. Don't I count? I go to your restaurants all week, but not on Friday and Saturday nights because I can't get in, too many people have driven in for a night on the town, in my town. Vote for the First Avenue streetcar so people can come here without having to drive and park. Then we could all sit out on your popular sidewalk patios without breathing exhaust fumes, and might actually be able to hold a conversation without shouting.



Bedlam is a great new coffee house in Belltown that has really raised my hopes for the neighborhood, and I try to stop by every day. I think they're trying to be the living room or community center for the neighborhood, and I really like it. There is a free meeting room in the back that anyone can reserve. They have sidewalk chalk on hand that people make great use of. They have also rescued the Belltown Needle, a local icon that appeared last Halloween on a vacant lot (where the Speakeasy used to be; see Hideous Belltown for that history) that the owner is ready to grade for a parking lot (temporary, everyone hopes). Now that the street park has passed, they hope to put the local needle on a pedestal on Second and Bell. I like this place and I hope they do well and can stick around.

  

One of the early users of the sidewalk chalk wrote "CRACK - COFFEE - CRACK" with arrows pointing in the appropriate directions. This is one of the things that worries people about the Bell Street Park; that it will just be more of a haven for drug dealers. I worry about this myself. The level of drug presence goes up and down in Belltown. There were dealers all over the sidewalks all the time; then the Honduran drug gang chased them away; then the Hondurans got busted. Now with non-stop street construction all over Belltown, and new businesses like Bedlam coming in, the dealers seem to have a low profile. I've been going to Bedlam every morning, and usually walking by after work too, and not seeing any drug dealers all week. Then Friday morning there are all these young men on the sidewalk throwing gang signs at each other, and I finally realized what was going on - people don't just drive to Belltown on weekends for a night on the town at a restaurant or club; they drive here for drugs, and the dealers show up for them. Why should we provide parking for people coming to our neighborhood to buy drugs, attracting the dealers and leaving us with all of the attendant ills of the drug trade? Maybe it's not hurting you, buyers, but there's a lot of unpleasantness that goes with the business that you don't live here to see.

Most of the streets of my neighborhood have been in various stages of reconstruction for some months, which is sometimes fascinating. I've already discussed the bricks under Fourth Avenue. The other day I was walking to work (I usually get distracted by something or other when walking to work) and stopped on Second Avenue to watch them digging up the street. I had seen a pile of timbers there the day before and was curious about them. That morning I got to watch the guy with the backhoe carefully picking these timbers out of old concrete deep in the street bed. The Merlino Construction foreman came over to talk to me (I was taking photos) and told me that these were streetcar crossties put down before the turn of the last century, and that you could tell because they were untreated heart of cedar. We both commented on how they were taking these old remnants out now, while we are building new streetcar tracks elsewhere. It was a fabulous reveal of a moment in history. I hope the First Avenue streetcar passes and gets built soon.

 

 

 

"Adjacent, Against, On"

There is a large art installation in Myrtle Edwards Park titled "Adjacent, Against, On". It reminds me about the often controversial decisions to be made when a new fixed-infrastructure transit line is planned. Should it be above, below, or at grade? Dedicated right-of-way or shared with other traffic modes? If a combination of those, what circumstances determine each condition? Communities through which new fixed-rail transit lines are planned often express a preference for grade-separated alignments, an elevated or a subway, to minimize street congestion and conflicts with other modes of travel, or because of perception of trains as loud and/or dangerous. For alignments that pass through a major urban center below-grade is particularly desirable. An extensive below-grade alignment is a very expensive choice and difficult to justify in most cases. It is fairly easy to tunnel through the soft clay under London, much easier than cutting a path through the non-linear street system; subsequently the London Underground is like an earthworm warren of winding tunnels passing over and under each other. Manhattan is built on granite, and the cut-and-cover tunnels are very expensive and disruptive during construction, making it difficult to get a new line even when justified by high population density and surface congestion.



Second in popularity is an elevated line. Our monorail is appealing because the concrete I-beam track creates less shadowing than a double-track rail bed. Because it is grade separated it doesn't interfere with traffic at street level. Monorail systems are still fairly rare; each tends to be proprietary, unique, non-interchangeable and stand-alone.



A popular elevated light rail system is ALRT, for Automated Light Rail Transit. This system functions very well in Vancouver, B.C. and is being expanded there. It doesn't need an operator because it is entirely grade-separated, with no potential for intermodal conflicts. ALRT is faster and more efficient than other light rail, making more trips and carrying more riders because it doesn't have to slow down or stop in mixed traffic.



Because of costs, most new rail systems are at grade for most of the route. Sometimes they don't even begin as rail, but as BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), a bus system with dedicated right-of-way and infrastructure that makes possible later conversion to rail, if increased ridership justifies it (rail has greater capacity than a bus system). Light rail systems are quite often some combination of at, above and below grade; dedicated and shared right-of-way. DART rail in Dallas, for instance, passes over arterial intersections in the outer sections of the routes, is at one point deep below grade at Cityplace Station, then emerges at grade and goes into Bryan Street through downtown Dallas. The street was dedicated to the light rail and other vehicles are not allowed. When the MAX goes into downtown Portland, it has a dedicated lane but otherwise shares the streets with other vehicles, with no barrier between. Cities (or their citizenry) have different levels of tolerance for light rail integrated in the street; Portland's higher tolerance allows the light rail to act almost as a streetcar while in downtown.







Then there are actual streetcars, which serve a different purpose than light rail or other systems but can work in conjunction with them as an important part of a comprehensive transit system. Streetcars are slow-paced, move with the traffic in the street (sometimes with signal priority) and make frequent stops. They are good for business as people get a good view of the shopfronts as they are passing by and can easily get off at the next stop to go back and check out something of interest. As a fixed rail investment they also promote new development, redevelopment and infill of urban areas. Streetcars that link to light rail stations are especially effective. The vintage trolley line in Dallas links to the DART at one station, and soon will link to another. The Portland streetcar is on an intersecting grid with the MAX, with convenient linkages to that and to the regional and commuter rail at Union Station. In Toronto the streetcar actually goes below grade to connect with the subway at Yonge. There are so many working variations.

The underworld is traditionally a place of mystery, the abode of the dead and the faery folk. Aside from the supernatural, we don't really know what lies deep under Seattle. That's why this geotech firm was taking borings before the start of designing the deep bore tunnel that was approved to replace the Viaduct. In loose terms, Seattle sits over a bowl of glacial fill, unstable in earthquakes, but more specific information is needed for tunnel placement.



I don't like big expenditures for auto infrastructure but don't really mind this new tunnel, even though the cost projections are hugely expensive and there are likely to be huge overruns (on an encouraging aside, Link light rail is 138 million under budget). The tunnel will route freight and auto through traffic off of our waterfront and downtown surface streets. My hope is that the tunnels two decks will be constructed so that one day rail traffic could be carried through it. Or perhaps it could be abandoned altogether (an expensive abandonment) once it has served its purpose. This Battery Street tunnel will be closed when the new tunnel is in place and the Viaduct torn down. They say this cut-and-cover tunnel will be filled in, but I'm not sure how that would be done. Maybe it will just be blocked off, like the ghost stations of the London Underground.



The Great Northern (now BNSF) rail tunnel was dug by hand in 1904 and still routes freight and passenger rail under the city. It was hugely expensive for it's time with costs of $1.5 million. The two railroads that originally used it paid for it's construction, at the city's request, for the purpose of clearing and beautifying the streets of an ambitious city with great aspirations.



The Metro Bus Tunnel, or more correctly, Transit Tunnel, is a double-bore tunnel 60 feet below downtown Seattle. Completed in 1989, it came in at about $455 million in cost. The bores were large enough to someday accommodate rail. In fact rails were laid when the tunnel was constructed, but had to be replaced during the 2005 to 2007 retrofit for Link light rail, which will open this July 18th. Both rail and bus will operate in the tunnel; after observing a southbound stoppage on Friday when an ST bus broke down, I am wondering just how well that will work. The point is, though, that it was forward-thinking all along.



The "Seattle Process" is often blamed for blocking progress, but I don't think this was always the case. After Seattle burned in 1889, city leaders made plans to rebuild the city for better infrastructure function, i.e. plumbing and transportation, leading to the regrading of the street levels. Business owners couldn't wait, and rebuilt at the existing street levels while the new street construction was taking place, with results that you can see and hear about on the Underground Tour. You can't stop progress, but you can progressively adapt to it when the stages don't quite mesh. That's why I'm not too concerned about our expensive new tunnel.

Transportation drives development. At times the discussions revolve around how land use affects transportation, but the transportation decisions were made first. This is why private land developers once created their own streetcar lines, to entice people to visit and buy homes in their subdivisions which now make up the inner ring neighborhoods of many cities. The best examples are close-in, compact and convenient, usually very walkable to enable easy access to the streetcar, with a tight street grid of small blocks. Many of the great Chicago neighborhoods were streetcar suburbs, with the streetcar lines and ensuing development radiating away from the lakefront downtown core. Hyde Park in Austin shows the classic short-block form, is very popular and walkable, and has one of the lowest crime rates in the city to boot, disproving the "defensible space" theory of cul-de-sacs (for more quantifiable evidence see this 10mb thesis). Seattle has many great, compact and walkable neighborhoods which were once connected to downtown by streetcars.

The short block street grid of Hyde Park, a streetcar suburb in Austin

Some cities never gave up their streetcars, Toronto, for instance. The TTC Red Rockets are a familiar fact of life, as is the necessity of vehicles stopping to let passengers board and deboard the center aligned streetcars. That sort of civility can be relearned even when the city habit has been long broken, even in an auto-centric, big-oil loving city like Dallas. When they brought back the McKinney Avenue trolley, people had to learn how to stop for the trolley car, how to watch for it as it moves on tracks from center to side alignment, and to accept a few inconvenient stops and slow-downs. They seem to manage fine, although it helps that the enthusiastic volunteer motormen get out to make sure the traffic stops and will let drivers know if they have transgressed.

   

The previously private relationship between transportation and land development changed with the creation of the interstate highway system, when road building became the responsibility of the taxpayers via the government, and we all unwillingly or unwittingly subsidized auto-centric sprawling development. Now there is renewed interest in reestablishing streetcars in city streets, under a different sort of transportation funding and development model. Streetcars often represent shared public and private costs, a sort of mix of the purely private early streetcars and the typical public mass transit project. The capital financing for the initial outlay of street infrastructure, railstock, and operating agency often relies on a public or local improvement district, essentially a local tax district. Businesses, residents and property owners along the route, who are presumed to benefit from it, pay into the district fund. The PID along McKinney Avenue in Dallas provided a very good return in investment to the businesses and property owners along the route, which generated immense redevelopment and rise of property values, and therefore tax rates.

Streetcars on fixed rails are the type of investment that spurs development, and routes are planned accordingly through areas where the greatest redevelopment is desired, such as the South Lake Union streetcar (no, I won't use the original acronym here, you already know it). Seattle is planning other streetcar routes which are not fully decided yet. One is planned through my neighborhood on 1st Avenue, although the Belltown business owners have been vehemently against it. I don't know how to argue against the costs they bear, as I don't think I could run a business myself, but I think their greater fear has been loss of street parking. The good news for those of us who want a streetcar is that property owners along the whole route, from Seattle Center to Pioneer Square, get to vote on whether or not to approve the taxing district, which improves chances of it passing. The streetcar will have six minute headways, on a center alignment, with two or three stops in Belltown, fewer than the bus stops but encouraging more walking - along businesses frontages, of course. The buses will move to 2nd Avenue.

Cross posted to Great City

While the digital city building continues, it's good to take a break and get to the real bricks and mortar city - bricks, in particular. There are still bricks under many Seattle streets, fire-hardened road bricks that last forever and are sometimes briefly uncovered during road resurfacing projects. They are abraded by the asphalt removal machines, and fragmented by every utility project that trenches through and is filled with concrete afterwards, leaving a patchwork of brick and other paving surfaces. The brick is a wonderful material from a slower time, and is still the pavement on Pike Place and the Pike and First intersection, making a washboard sound when vehicles drive over them, letting drivers know that this place is not the typical engineered-for-autos route and encouraging them to slow down. It's a sad sight when progress finally catches up to the old brick and it is torn out entirely for a new concrete roadway, which handles heavy bus traffic and weathering better than pothole-prone asphalt.

     

Sometimes the brick wins out. During a resurfacing project on McKinney Avenue in Dallas, Texas, not only were the remnant areas of the old bricks uncovered, but also the original streetcar rails down the center of the street. This led to bringing back the old streetcar line with vintage cars, redesigning the street as the slow-paced streetcar commuter corridor it once was, and revitalizing the ailing neighborhoods that were once the premiere streetcar suburbs for the city. The street was resurfaced with new brick, and the remaining old bricks were used for crosswalks, intersections, transit stops and sidewalk accents. It was quite an amazing and effective transformation.

The emblem of Dallas, Pegasus rising, is borrowed from the logo of the former Mobil Oil Corporation. Big oil and JR Ewing oil tycoons are stereotypical Dallas icons. The city once had an impressive downtown core, with a ring of convenient streetcar suburbs. A celebration of the freedom and independence of private vehicles gave birth to a ring of highways that throttled the downtown, cut off the inner suburbs, and generated an almost incomprehensible scale of sprawling development across the vast spaces of the North Texas prairies. Downtown was very densely compact, never very large in area. This was possible because the buildings had very little associated parking, as people rode streetcars into town. As automobiles replaced streetcars, parking lots ate away the civic body like a cancer. It still looks like a war zone in places, with solitary buildings standing in a vacant wasteland.



Although the damage is vast and possibly beyond repair, Dallas is changing. They have in place a successful light rail system, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) which feeds from suburban cities through the downtown core. It is successful enough that it has captured a major share of federal transit funds for expansion.

 

This transit revolution includes revival of the streetcar suburbs. When McKinney Avenue was being resurfaced in the 1980s, the original streetcar tracks down the center were uncovered. A hobbyist and enthusiast started the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority, which in 1989 brought back a trolley system with vintage cars to this original alignment. The historic State Thomas streetcar suburb, which had been decimated through decay and neglect after being cut off from the downtown by highways, experienced a renaissance of compact transit oriented development. I lived in this neighborhood for a time, worked for the company that had planned it, and lived in a building designed by the architects I worked with. Talk about immersion. I would ride the trolley to work downtown, or often walk, which meant crossing the Woodall Rogers Freeway. A plan for a highway lid park to reconnect the Downtown to the State Thomas neighborhood, now part of a larger area of intense, and intensely popular redevelopment called Uptown, has been under discussion. Will the city learn to walk again? Already people fill the suburban DART park and ride lots to capacity, and walk across a quarter mile of parking to get to the station. The next step is to condense walkable development in that quarter mile.

  

For some time I have been wondering about this vacant building, with its intriguing terra cotta tile imagery, including a version of that mysterious illuminated pyramid that also appears on our dollar bill. The mystery is now clear. The building, most recently known as the William Tell Apartments and owned by affordable housing provider Plymouth Housing Group, has been bought for redevelopment as a hotel or hostel. It was first built as the Lorraine Hotel, so reuse has brought it full circle. Plymouth Housing Group will build a new affordable housing building with the proceeds, on the site of a current surface parking lot. It is certainly a much higher and better use. Here are some shots of auto fluid leaks washing from that parking lot into the storm system at the start of our winter rainy system. Stormwater is the largest source of pollutants entering Puget Sound.

 

The Lorraine Hotel was emblematic of Belltown's former history in the film industry. Another historic aspect of Second Avenue in Belltown is these large cedars planted as street trees. The tree wells are in the middle of the sidewalk, with maples planted at the corner ends. Bradford pears are planted in tree wells on the street edge of the sidewalk, leaving the cedars in the center. It forms an allee, a double row of trees to walk through. Although this, in combination with sidewalk cafes, makes for a crowded sidewalk, walking beneath the cedars is a very aromatic experience, especially in the fall when the seeds fall from the cones, and the leafs are falling from the maples, and the sidewalks are not regularly swept in front of the buildings that are vacant. The fragrances are very sweet, like the scent of memory.

There are new positions open on the Seattle Planning Commission. I had briefly considered applying, for about 30 seconds, then admitted to myself that I am involved in too much already. After attending a monthly Futurewise TOD brown-bag forum today and hearing repeatedly how our land use codes inhibit or prohibit outright the types of development that would add amenity and quality of life to our neighborhoods, I am reconsidering. We badly need code reform.

 

But that's not the only issue. We have long-established single-family neighborhoods where people seem to have opposing goals. We have people saying that they want more parking, but less traffic. More neighborhood retail, but not more density to support it. More sidewalks, infrastructure, parks, amenities - but still have the detached house surrounded by what is essentially a private park that creates distance from transit and the amenities that everyone wants in their own neighborhood. The point, as Jim Mueller, a local developer, stated very well today, is that density is not something bad, density is not just something that "people have to take in their neighborhoods" as someone else had stated, but that density provides amenity, is an amenity, is the means to having the amenities that everyone says that they want in their neighborhood.

 

Other discussion was around new neighborhood development being project driven rather than place driven. Development comes at a faster pace than the supporting infrastructure and amenities that should come along with it. I think part of the fault is in our neighborhood planning process. From what I've seen of the neighborhood plans, while many are thoughtful, comprehensive and well written, they are really not much more than wish lists. There is no defined path to implementation. We can say that we want to go to Timbuktu, but if we don't know how to get there, it's not likely that we will. An implementable neighborhood plan would have some recognition of what changes might take place - where are the development opportunity sites, what and how much might go there; what zoning codes are barriers to desirable development; where are the opportunity sites for neighborhood amenities. Change the codes; match projected development and amenity opportunities over a set time period, and require that new development contribute its share to the pool for future amenities, along with publicly funded contributions and the potential funding source.

 

The next question has to do with retail. What is required to get, keep and support neighborhood retail? Is it more parking? More density of people to provide trade? Cheaper rents? If neighborhood retail is an amenity, should it have more incentives, subsidies? Something perhaps like our Public Market? Of course the Market is in a very high density neighborhood, by my rough calculation around 70 dwelling units per acre just in the historic district. It also gets 10 million tourists a year. Yet even in this packed-with-pedestrians Market, the merchants are sure they can't survive without plenty of convenient, cheap parking.

 

It seems to be part of the larger cultural shift that we may just have to grow out of generationally, if we can afford the time. One woman at the forum forthrightly admitted that there had to be parking because she is never going to ride the bus; it just isn't going to happen. She was on the earlier side of the baby boom generation; that generation (which I am at the very tail end of) will not be making many more decisions for the future. It's already out of their (I'm not quite ready to say our) hands, as the recent election has shown. And there are other options. When street parking is closer to market rate, and it becomes even more inconvenient to drive to and park at your destination, you can take a taxi, as people do all over Manhattan.I don't favor taxis because they are single-occupant vehicles, but they are an option - and more cabbies are driving hybrid cars. There are also options for people staying in single-family homes and neighborhoods, but adding "invisible" density that doesn't rapidly change the neighborhood character, such as dividing a house to take boarders, or adding an accessory dwelling unit, if room allows. These are already legal options.