very confusing with da Joshes…

I agree that the Mayor can not singularly create massive change that we need. It has to be based in a desire of the people. And in a town that endorses the Discovery Institute candidate, we have some challenges…

And this is why I believe McGinn has not been the agent of change that he has led many to believe he is. The vision of bike filled streets and street cars and light rail everywhere is still a pipe dream too. Why?

Because McG isn’t really talking to the truth of the significant structural changes that Seattle would have to make nor describing how they could be achieved and how he would take us there.

Where is the frank discussion about removing parking downtown (as our idolized Copenhagen has), or stopping parking to be built for ANY housing in the urban village centers and hubs, or taxing the hell outa parking, or making everyone (that includes developers) ponying up to pay for massive local Seattle transit infrastructure (and ignoring lightrail which is a regional system), etc etc. Where is the discussion of what it would take to do these things, how to time them, how to transition our people and commerce, etc.

There’s a big gap between the truth and the fantasy, and we ain’t hearing about it from Mike.

And if he rolls over on the tunnel issue – his bellwether – how will address any of these other significant challenges.

Now if I really believed that once in power McG would take on that leadership, I would support him – as ardently as many on this blog have.

But his past track record with the green-washed GCI, his refusal to acknowledge that massive urban projects like Dearborn were BS, his role in SLU, and the reaction of his peers in Greenwood or colleagues on the parks levy lead me to conclude he is not all that he’s portrayed as.

He rolled over and it shows that he’s been blowing smoke all along.

As to your content point – I too agree that we need density around transit centers though I have “ranted” about differentiating between transit adjacent density and TOD. And if you have followed me over the years, affordable housing is something I have pushed for even greater outcomes that what is considered successful today.

But please don’t conflate, as it seems that many folks here and other places do, ‘density’ with successful urban growth, i.e. density for density’s sake. And that taller is the only way to go.

What I have suggested in the last few weeks is that GCI has been selling the “density=sustainability” as the mantelpiece over an agenda of relaxed development constraints, reduced burdens on developer contributions to the community, expedited development review processes and other mechanisms to stimulate more profitable development. The bait and switch is that the citizenry pays the amenities, not the developer – even with the added value of upzoning.

Better solution? off the top of my head:

- Regional public transit needs to be high speed rail along the I-5 and other prime corridors
- Seattle public transit should, in these austere times, focus on cost effective solutions (bus, van/jitney services, etc)
- We need to break the hub and spoke primacy of the downtown core and transit by distributing job centers to other secondary town centers – perhaps the urban villages
- we need to relax our use based zoning constraints and encourage small, local business development – including light manufacturing in all zones (neighborhood approved)
- look to more sustainable urban infill through cottage and accessory housing – it is also the most affordable and respectful of the streetscape
- recognize that nodes are not the only solution, we have linear constructs that need to addressed as well

To be continued for sure…

A little digging revealed the 4-lane cut-n-cover ‘tunnel-lite’ had shoulders wide enough to act as an extra lane during rush hours, which essentially made it a 6-lane cut-n-cover tunnel.

A favorable analysis of the 4-lane cut-n-cover reveals how it maintains the Western/Elliott access ramps which accommodate the roughly 40,000 vehicles daily that will be dumped onto the new Alaskan Way (through 15+ stoplights) with the Deep-bore. Not good.

Not to worry, the proposed Mercer East Project will take ’some’ of the traffic load off Alaskan Way by turning Mercer into a freight and major thru-corridor between Elliott and the Deep-bore portal on Aurora. What!!

If the AWV replacement is to be a tunnel, the 4-lane Cut-n-cover is the better option. WsDOT may have finished their studies of this ‘tunnel-lite’ a year later with Scenario ‘G’ 4-lane Cut-n-cover. It may not have been ready to go to a public vote in March 2007. They were mostly talking “6-lane Cut-n-cover” complete with drastic looking construction scheduling, leading up to that vote.

Seattle Times pulled out its punditry pop-guns to shoot down the 4-lane cut-n-cover, pew pew!! But the article’s title “AWV tunnel claims: Who’s right?” is another case of smite makes right.

The tunnel is a red herring issue. Even McGinn admits that the tunnel could be built by his administration or not built in a Mallahan administration.

If we really believe that we have a MAJOR problem, in order to “fix” Seattle or even WA state, we should be looking at dramatic and replicatable actions in short order. I say ‘replicatable’ because we alone can’t solve this global problem – the best we could do is show the world a way to do it.

Recycling percentages, reduced VMT, etc are only feelgood actions that merely nip at the apple.

Look at some the types of issues we face and how delusional we are about really dealing with carbon and and other sustainability realities:

- our regional economy is heavily based on unsustainable industries, such as Boeing and air travel (duh, we built light rail to the airport).

- we “plan” transit oriented light rail hubs, but has anyone suggested that we not allow any parking for the housing in these zones (save for car sharing). We will disallow park and ride that would serve the extant population though. The net affect – fancy urban centers for the wealthy downtown working class.

- has anyone suggested removing downtown parking as our idols in Copenhagen have?

- why aren’t we more aggressively creating the conditions for forcing our existing population reduce their footprint. We ban bags, yet Costco and Trader Joes package sell produce in plastic. Where’s the bottled water ban?

- why not spend the $290M Mercer money on a light rail along a corridor line Rainier Ave instead of good money on more roads…

- why aren’t we aggressively changing our building codes to be more sustainable (eg grey water). Green walls and roofs are a joke.

- Sharrows are another embarrassing joke – even bike lanes are inadequate. We should be closing whole streets to traffic and creating bike only corridors. Mike may bike (sometimes) but most people are afraid to.

- We should remove our zoning constructs which have created a city based on single use zones to truly create complete urban villages – throughout the city.

- the real Puget Sound infrastructure sin is I-5 and the cross-lake freeways. Where are the demands for rapid transit along those corridors, or even stronger taxing of out of commuting workers to discourage these locational failings.

Jabe, if your post was to be some implied endorsement of McGinn, I refuse to believe that Mike is the truly ‘green progressive’ candidate — or we would hear about these REAL issues.

Instead, McGinn has pushed a green-washed “density=sustainability” pablum that really only favors a particular class of developer and property owner. And solve a crisis for a population that hasn’t even arrived yet to Seattle.