Comments on: File Under Portland Envy

By: wood working projects

wood working projects — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:54:55 +0000

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[...]File Under Portland Envy | hugeasscity[...]…

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Louboutins Shoes — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 06:51:23 +0000

Super ce blog,Given that McGinn was elected on an environmental platform, and given that McGinn supporters have been clamoring for policies that will make Seattle the nation’s first carbon-neutral city,

By: chambre hotes finistere

chambre hotes finistere — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:57:28 +0000

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location gite guadeloupe — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:03:48 +0000

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By: Bill B

Bill B — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:24:33 +0000

from Publicola:
At yesterday’s city council retreat/question-and-answer free-for-all, newly elected City Council member Mike O’Brien asked his former Sierra Club cohort, Mike McGinn, what sounded like a softball: Given that McGinn was elected on an environmental platform, and given that McGinn supporters have been clamoring for policies that will make Seattle the nation’s first carbon-neutral city, O’Brien asked, what kind of forward-thinking climate initiative might McGinn push as mayor?

McGinn’s somewhat surprising (underwhelming?) response: “I’ve only thought a little bit about it. … I’m not terribly inclined, frankly, to stick some bold stake in the ground about where we’re going to be in the future. … It feels good to set bold goals… but it doesn’t feel good to set bold goals and then take steps that are inconsistent with them.”

http://publicola.net/?cat=20

By: Wells

Wells — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:50:36 +0000

Ross, I tried to portray the differences I perceive between Portland and Seattle and their respective metropolitan areas. If there’s a principle difference, it’s that Portland metropolitan area cities more carefully practice infill development than does Seattle area cities, even though Seattle area landscape consists of more wetland, forested hillside and watershed. Personally, I really can envision the cities within the Portland region developing into thriving and marvelous places, much like inner-city Portland.

It may be that property taxes indeed discourage homeowner support of taxation for transit systems, but I doubt it. My take on all urban and transportation planning is bare bones engineering, not funding mechanisms. The Greenline Monorail in my opinion was very poor engineering. I favored the East Queen Anne route along Westlake and along the downtown Seattle waterfront in place of the AWV and above Battery Street. I figured it had lower impact, triple the ridership base, and affected much more development. No one took the time to think about it. I still support monorail to West Seattle and Ballard following that route though I’d plan to extend to Northgate and Seatac Link LRT station junctions/terminii.

By: The Coolest Park & Ride Ever | hugeasscity

The Coolest Park & Ride Ever | hugeasscity — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:12:12 +0000

[...] keep my employer out of HAC, but recent discussions of park & rides combined with a bad case of Portland envy compel me to break that rule presently. For you see, my GGLO colleagues and I just responded to a [...]

By: Ross

Ross — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:37:13 +0000

Wells: I totally agree with the first two paragraphs. I think from there you exaggerate a bit. The Portland area deserves a lot of credit, but the greater Seattle planning suffers from quite a few bad decisions and a bad tax system. We have no income tax, so any tax will raise the already high property or sales tax. This makes it hard to get big transit projects done. The greater Seattle area rejected rail plan after rail plan before we got the current (half ass) system we have now. We did manage to approve a very nice monorail, only to see it fail because of an accounting error. Probably the worst part of the state’s tax system is the requirement that gas tax money go to roads.

I guess I would quibble with your assessment a bit, in that the big problem in the Seattle area is that it took us so long to have any growth plan in place, not that our growth plan is focused on the city. Over the last twenty years we’ve had plenty of growth in the suburbs, while we’ve put limits on the skyscrapers downtown. If we had a more organized system, then much of the suburban growth just wouldn’t have happened (Microsoft would have located in downtown Seattle, perhaps, or maybe Everett or Tacoma). Had that happened, then the current voting trends (towards spending money on transit) probably would have happened much quicker.