(from http://www.time.com/time/2007/america_numbers/commuting.html)

The point about Copenhagen and Amsterdam is their night time and daytime maps, which would most likely be more equalized than Seattle’s. Regardless of street layout, their urban functions are marbled. Our current LightRail+TOD approach by the City/State incents mixed-use but not much else.

Thank you for not calling me out, David, with what exactly? If anyone is condescending prick….

Copenhagen was in fact planned around a hub-and-spoke model. In 1947 the “finger plan” was adopted wherein 5 fingers were developed radiating out from the city center along S-Train lines. It is very visible on a map as well as from the ground when traveling around Copenhagen. What’s made Copenhagen successful isn’t the topography of the city, but rather the content of the city and the citizens’ commitment to changing the city’s culture after the 1970’s energy crisis.

One of the reasons we’ve struggled in getting light rail in this city (aside from the obvious limitations of being a mid-size city with tremendous physical obstacles) is that there has been a huge growth in suburban business buildings. If more people worked downtown, or in a few central locations (like the U district) then a rail system would provide a lot more benefit for the miles covered.

I don’t know about Copenhagen, but it was pretty obvious to me where the center of Amsterdam was when I was there. Seriously, for those who’ve never been there, go on Google maps and take a guess. The city looks like a set of concentric circles to me. The striking thing about Amsterdam, though, is not this design, but how much of it is green. It is rather striking that in the most densely populated country in the most densely populate continent that there is so much green and so few huge buildings. In that regard, you make a very good point. Amsterdam (and the rest of the Netherlands) make for a very good model of development. What makes them special, though, is not their lack of hub and spoke (L. A. has way less of a hub than Amsterdam or New York) but their preservation of green space in the city and the mix of mid-size development.

In many ways, that is the obvious solution to the problem: preserve green space and watch the density increase. How it increases will be very interesting to watch. While plenty of folks will love to see the density of the city increase, just as many (myself included) would love to see the suburbs actually be nice places to live. There are lots of people who would love to live on a small house with a small lot (think San Francisco) but really don’t have that option (unless they spend big bucks on a skinny city house). It would be nice if the suburbs looked like that. Actually, it would be nice if the suburbs had houses like most of Seattle’s houses. If they did, there would be a lot less sprawl and lot more affordable housing.

I agree that the current light rail stations are not where the jobs are, but it’s pretty hard to argue that future stations at Husky Stadium, Northgate, and Bellevue are for bedroom communities.

To answer the question posed in the last paragraph:
1)Urban Model -> 2)Zoning -> 3)Individual buildings

1) Seattle, like almost every American city, suffers in some way from the hub and spoke model. Everyone works in the center and goes to sleep elsewhere (and that really doesn’t matter as long as you can get there). As it stands, our current light rail model is another fat spoke connecting new bedroom communities to the almighty Downtown. When you consider a place like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, it’s hard to determine what exactly is the downtown. Instead of one center, many smaller centers are networked together with rail and bus. Density is not just about mixed-use plopped next to a bus station. It is the formation of neighborhoods that are self sufficient in business, commerce, residence, culture, and maintenance. The hub and spoke, as it is in Seattle, does not support it.

2) In comparison to Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Seattle’s zoning looks like the board game Candyland. Our setbacks and envelope limitations are some Frankenstein of country living individualism and metropolitan living. Just look at the Seattle Times article mentioned here a few weeks ago about the Mother-In-Law zoning proposition. It’s a big deal to have your neighbor’s wall on your property, and it’s an unthinkable big deal to actually share a party wall in your, *gasp*, private house. Borneo Sporenberg is a good example of energy and land efficiency, but our landscape fetish does not support it. We insist on having squarish houses and small window on the sides looking down on fences and shrubs. Like Michael McGinn said last week on KUOW’s Weekday, there are a lot of great housing solutions available that are deemed off-the-wall by our land use codes.

3) When actually talking about the environmental impact of a building, both in manufacturing and energy use, it’s hard to determine what is what times what. Is a house that has a lower R value but heats all its water via the roof more or less energy “conscious”? Or the house that has the big windows that loose the precious R but a thermal mass floor and walls that collect sun heat? These things are hard to quantify for bureaucracies because often the ecological benefits are fuzzy, long term, or just hard to quantify.

We need a mayor who is brave enough to stick it to the NIMBYers, reform our zoning/land use codes, and require some real givebacks from developers. Then we can start actually experimenting with new dense housing solutions that don’t look like the Fischer Price condos+town houses that popped up in the last decade. And maybe in the future we’ll take the step of deconstructing Downtown and start putting up real office space in, say, oh Beacon Hill anyone? Or how about next to the new Capitol Hill station in 2016?

Solution for now: Vote Mike Mcginn