This blog has become a far more interesting trip than I ever imagined. Many many big big thank yous to all you contributors and commenters and readers.

Below is my opening salvo at Publicola.

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SUSTAINABLE URBANISM IS THE LEAST OF OUR WORRIES

Case in point: The above photo. We’ll get back to that.

But apparently enough of you find sustainable urbanism (whatever that means) to be sufficiently scintillating that the overlords of PubliCola were compelled to seek out a supplemental source of deep thoughts on said topic to feed the expansion of their new media empire.

So here’s what they did: they gobbled up hugeasscity. Greed. Is. Good. Or something.

And now contemplate this: hugeasscity is to lose its PubliCola virginity with this very post. I’m sure we all want it to be meaningful. And yes, sustainable cities are the key to the future prosperity of humanity and all that. And yes, the PubliCola hugeasscity column can be counted on to deliver the goods on that topic for the next several decades or until PubliCola is bought out by Rupert Murdoch.

But this  post is special. It wants to be about something deeper. Or else shallower. Or better, both at the same time.

Thankfully, the Coke machine in the photo spoke to me. ‘Cause the image on that mundane machine is so wrong on so many levels it hurts to think about it.

Seriously. What the hell kind of culture uses an image like that to sell stuff? It’s a very young child—a girl, I suppose we should assume—so what’s with all the glossy red lipstick? It’s sickeningly ambiguous. And that’s right, displaying this innocent babe sucking up nutritionless sugar water is a calculated strategy to get us all jazzed about what that machine has to offer. Sorry to get all potty-mouthed in my first post but let’s face it: That’s totally fucked.

On top of that, the U.S. has a widely discussed obesity epidemic. Still, simply because Coca-Cola’s executives have figured out a legal way to make piles of money, our culture can’t resist worshiping their success. Never mind that those piles come in exchange for empty calories derived from government subsidized corn. Yup, and right next to that machine is another one filled with corporate processed food. And both are conveniently located right next to the entrance to the building’s fitness center.

Which leads to a question:  How can we possibly hope to create sustainable cities when we are completely embedded with sociopathic institutions that churn out abominations like that Coke machine and the stuff inside it?

Truth be told, I think Coca-Cola on ice is delicious. And it’s great to be here on PubliCola. And worry not, hugeasscity fans, there will be pictures of buildings.

[ A note of explanation:  This post was deemed inappropriate for PubliCola consumption,  so I'm publishing it here, and realizing how much I miss the old hugeasscity. ]

Change is good. And during my recent blogging hiatus, mind purified and calm after a 600-mile sprint through the Pyrenees on a Ducati 996 followed by a two-day ayahuasca binge curled up in an abandoned spider monkey nest 120 feet above the Amazon rain forest floor, my destiny crystallized: sex advice columnist. Yes, the seemingly whimsical choice of the name hugeasscity happened for a reason.

And so, gentle readers, say hello to The Sexy Planner.

Really. I mean, how many times can a thinking, feeling human being pontificate on housing-unit density and alternative transportation modes before ossifying into a passionless, barren shell? Need to put the brakes on a lusty scene spiraling out of control? Simply utter these words: “comprehensive planning.”

Now, transitioning from starkly depressing diatribes on the inevitable downfall of the American Way of Life to chipper advice on the most functional surface textures of vibrators is a big leap for any writer to make, no doubt. So my angle for a new sex advice column is to anchor it with what I know, which, unfortunately, is pretty unsexy stuff,  but at least lends itself to an alliterative title: Land Use Love.

Fortunately, even though our culture has become sexually permissible to the point where you can now buy lavishly equipped S&M dungeon kits at WalMart, most of us are still as neurotically dysfunctional about sex as ever, so there’s always plenty of room in the market for a new angle on sex advice. That said, however, successfully combining supremely cold, sterile phrases like “policy framework” and “vehicle miles traveled” with lascivious discussions of all the possibilities suggested in the photo above, for example, will be no easy task.

But my oh my, how multitudinous and begging to be explored are the nexuses between the worlds of sex and urban planning: mixed-use zoning and polyamorism; design guidelines and leather fetishes; adaptive re-use and sex changes; carbon neutrality and bondage, beige subdivisions and the missionary position; “riding” a bike.

Yes, my fate is set—there’s no going back. Vanilla discussions of urbanism no longer do it for me. The future of hugeasscity is one in which car bashing posts will be replaced by insights on creative sex positions for the cramped interiors of SmartCars. Trains that stimulate more than TOD. Not your father’s environmental determinism.

So what about about it people? Are you hot for a little Land Use Love action?

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P.S. Have I mentioned that I’m gay? Well, bi, really, I guess. Let’s just say I’m exploring.

P.P.S. Don’t believe anything you read on personal blogs. Especially ones with the word “ass” in the title.

As a rule, I try to 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 call for concepts for Memorial Coliseum in Portland’s Rose Quarter. Our concept? Fill it with cars and make a gigantic park & ride out of it. Think I’m kidding? Go ahead, click those links. Here’s what we thunk up:

“We propose to repurpose Memorial Coliseum in a way that will foster Portland’s evolution into a model sustainable city of the future. Our concept begins with the counterintuitive conversion of the Coliseum into a colossal robotic parking garage. And it ends mid-century with the launching of a museum that celebrates the bygone era of the automobile.

“Portland has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, which will require a two thirds reduction in driving. Over the same time period, the Portland area is projected to grow by 90 percent. Fortuitously, this growth can actually help Portland achieve its GHG goals by increasing density; and the positive impact is maximized if growth is targeted in areas that are already relatively dense, such as downtown Portland. However, under current trends, fitting parking in high-density development places a severe liability on the creation of livable communities. Parking is expensive, consumes vast area, degrades the pedestrian realm, and hamstrings design.

“Our interim solution is to provide parking in peripheral locations, thereby reducing the need for cars to enter the city core, and enabling the core to develop without the impediment of parking. The Rose Quarter is an ideal parking location to serve downtown Portland, as users would have several public transit options to reach their final destinations. We also propose a pedestrian bridge across the river to facilitate walking.

“The Coliseum building is well-suited to hold a modular robotic parking system, and could accommodate roughly 5200 cars. Ideally, it would be one of several such ‘Mobility Centers’ that would ring downtown. Over time, as the city grows and reliance on cars declines, these facilities would be relocated to less urbanized areas.

“Eventually, when parking is no longer needed in the Coliseum, we propose convert it back to a civic use, namely the Car Memorial Museum. The robotic parking apparatus would then be repurposed to store museum specimens (i.e. cars), and to retrieve them on demand for close up display to museum patrons.”

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Anybody still with me? A thought experiment, yes, but not completely disconnected from reality. Because parking is a chicken/egg dilemma: we’d like to be able to design cities for people not cars, but since people are so dependent on cars, we continue to design cities for cars, which keeps people car dependent. Our proposed park & ride “moblity centers” could help break that vicious cycle.

Of course there are any number of reasons why such a model might fail. The biggest challenge would be getting people to use the park & ride given that it would make their trips less convenient. People would need a some kind of incentive to do it, the simplest solution being to make parking much cheaper there than in downtown.

The concept could also be criticized for the same reason some object to allowing park & rides in Seattle’s station areas—it’s infrastructure that’s supporting car use. On the other hand, it might be praised for many of the same reasons some believe it’s okay to allow park & rides in Seattle’s station areas—because it’s temporary, and has many potential side benefits.

But really, the coolest thing about this concept is the final incarnation of Memorial Coliseum as a museum to celebrate the bygone era of the fossil fuels and the automobile:  the “Car Memorial Museum.” By mid-century, the expectation is that central Portland will have become so dense, pedestrian-friendly, transit-rich, and car-free that the Rose Quarter Mobility Center would no longer be needed, and the Coliseum could be restored to a civic use.

Picture walking up to any one of several observation stations inside the museum, pressing a button to select the specific car from the collection that you would like to check out, and then having the robotic parking mechanism fetch the car and bring it to you, in the same way it once retrieved cars for their returning owners. Methinks we’d have a hit.

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The City’s no park-and-ride policy around light rail stations has long been contentious, and this past week the controversy  heated  up when several SE Seattle businesses were ordered to stop selling spots to commuters in their underutilized surface lots near the stations.  Yesterday, Mayor McGinn responded by imposing a 30-day moratorium on enforcement of the policy.

On the surface, the policy strikes many people as silly—or worse, counter to the goal of encouraging more people to take transit. After all, the dense and pedestrian-friendly transit-oriented communities that many expected to sprout up in advance of light rail have yet to materialize, and alternative modes of station access are underfunded, insufficient, and in some cases, unsafe.

And it’s true that if the goal is to maximize ridership in the short term, then the City should encourage parking at every station.  The park-and-riders would come, and the trains would be fuller.  

But unfortunately, pursuing that myopic goal would torpedo the long-term, transformative potential of the light rail investment.  The vision for these station areas—as articulated in the 2001 station area plans, and on track to be upheld in the neighborhood plan updates currently underway in three light rail station area neighborhoods—is the conversion of an auto-dominated area of the city into pedestrian friendly, mixed-use neighborhood centers where people can easily access light rail by foot, bike or bus. Allowing park and ride facilities is not only a flagrant disregard for that vision, but would also make it more difficult to achieve for two key reasons:

1. In many cases, these surface lots are the very properties that the city hopes will redevelop to help create more dense and pedestrian-friendly transit-oriented communities. Allowing income generation from retaining the surface lots will delay the necessary tipping point at which it becomes profitable to redevelop the properties.
2. Surface lots are hostile to pedestrians. They are unpleasant to walk along, and in poor lighting or with heavy traffic, can also be unsafe. Encouraging more cars to enter and leave these lots during peak commuting times, when people may be accessing the station by foot or bicycle, will only exacerbate safety issues.

But wouldn’t it be okay if the policy change is only temporary, as McGinn proposed?  Maybe.  But the difficulty of taking away something after it has been granted cannot be underestimated.  For instance, how would it be decided when was the optimum time for the parking ban to be reinstated? 

What’s needed here is patience. We will likely have to wait for the next development cycle before much building happens in the SE Seattle station areas, and they will remain less than ideal in the near term.  Because while the City had the vision in advance of light rail to implement policies that discourage auto-oriented uses, it unfortunately didn’t commit to the kind of meaningful public investment that would have catalyzed the creation of real transit-oriented communities.

The current economic slowdown presents a great opportunity for the City to make those investments out ahead of the next wave of development.  And that would entail addressing the very concerns that SE Seattle residents have raised for years: improvements to pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, economic development, crime and safety, school funding.

But now is not the time to backpedal on policy and accept band-aid fixes that will ultimately hold back progress towards establishing the walkable, mixed-use communities that make so much sense for high-capacity transit station areas.

The consequences of banning park and ride lots in station areas are not unintended.  The policy resulted from a thorough planning process, and its goal is long-term progress. Nothing has changed between 2001 and now that justifies abandoning that important long-term vision.

…my lips are sealed
Say something once
Why say it again?”

But thankfully, with the help of the fabulous interwebs, one can have nothing to say and still pretend to have something to say by copping what other people say. Watch me now: Apparently Alex Steffen was so bored this weekend he managed to crank out two great pieces, one on walkability:

The true test of walkability I think is this: Can you spend a pleasant half hour walking or on transit and end up at a variety of great places? The quality of having a feast of options available when you walk out your front door is what I starting to think of as “deep walkability.”

…A place that embraces deep walkability could almost be considered the very definition of a great city.

and one on green prosperity:  

Throughout much of the developed world, but especially in North America, the debate about sustainability is routinely framed as a trade-off between the environment and the economy. The problem is, no such trade-off exists…

The old economy is dead.

Connecting a few more dots on how transitioning to a green economy is a no brainer, first, we have Thomas Friedman prattling on again about green China (and as such, contradicting David Byrne, who couldn’t be more wrong about “why say it again?” when it comes to promoting massive cultural shifts):

We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.

And then there’s the new AP report that found stimulus spending on road construction has not led to gains in employment:

Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

So on top of it being a bad long-term investment in terms of creating green prosperity, road building also appears to be a bad short term investment. Brilliant.

Meanwhile, we have learned that a stimulus dollar spent on transit provides about twice as many jobs as a dollar spent on highway infrastructure:

…for every billion dollars spent on public transportation projects, 16,419 job-months were created. A billion dollars spent on highway infrastructure projects created only 8,781 job-months.

I’ve got nothing to say about any of this.

This past October the Portland City Council adopted a new Climate Action Plan, coauthored by the City and Multnomah County. The Plan includes a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, similar to the report recently published by the City of Seattle, but that’s where the similarity ends. Because apparently unlike Seattle, Portland is taking the issue of climate change seriously enough to follow up their GHG inventory with in-depth analysis, goals, and proposed actions.

The Portland/Multnomah County GHG inventory results look a lot like Seattle’s, with two notable exceptions. First, Multnomah’s total emissions have not fallen as much as Seattle’s—in 2008, Multnomah County’s emissions were one percent below 1990 levels, as compared to the seven percent drop achieved in Seattle. Seattle fared better because of larger reductions in emissions from the industrial and building sectors.

Second, Multnomah’s inventory doesn’t include air travel, so with that subtracted from Seattle’s data, Seattle wins the per capita emissions contest—9.2 metric tons per person per year compared to 11.9 metric tons in Multnomah. But, as has been discussed previously, the low carbon intensity of Seattle’s electricity complicates interpretation of these data points. In 2008, per capita electricity consumption was nearly the same—13,355 kWh in Seattle, and 12,074 kWh in Multnomah—but the per capita GHG emissions associated with that electricity use were 21 times higher in Multnomah than in Seattle.

It’s debatable how to account for regional elements like the electricity grid in local GHG inventories. But if Seattle gets credit in the GHG reduction contest for taking the initiative to build hydropower dams, then they also have a corresponding responsibility for the decimation of the salmon runs, which impacts the entire Pacific Northwest.

Another artifact of the higher carbon intensity electricity in the Portland area is a reduction of the relative contribution of transportation to total GHG emissions—it’s 38 percent in Multnomah, compared to 62 percent in Seattle. But that doesn’t mean people are driving less in Seattle. Depending on who’s numbers you believe (e.g. here, here, here, or here), per capita vehicle miles traveled in both places are in the range of 20 miles per day.

The short story is that carbon footprints are similar in Seattle and Portland because people’s lifestyles are essentially the same in both cities. But one marked difference between the two cities is how they followed through on all that GHG data they collected. Seattle’s analysis was minimal, as noted in previous posts (here, here, and here). In contrast, Portland uses the GHG inventory as a foundation upon which to build and extensive set of goals and actions for addressing climate change.

Reduction targets are established for 2030 and 2050. Goals and actions are divided into broad range of categories: Buildings and Energy; Urban Form and Mobility; Consumption and Solid Waste; Urban Forestry and Natural Systems; Food and Agriculture; Community Engagement; Climate Change Preparation; and Local Government Operations. And it’s all packaged up in a 70 page document with great graphics and thoughtful writing. The table below provides a good summary.

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Portland envy among urbanists has become a cliche, and there may well be more hype than substance. But still, there is something palpably exceptional about Portland’s approach to promoting sustainable urbanism, and in particular they always seem to be a few steps ahead of Seattle. For example, here’s a list of Portland area organizations that contributed to the Climate Action Plan:

• City of Portland Peak Oil Task Force
• Portland and Multnomah County Sustainable Developoment Commission
• Portland and Multnomah County Food Policy Council
• Mayor’s Planning and Sustainability Cabinet

Did you catch that? Portland has an official Peak Oil Task Force. Here in Seattle I get the sense that most of our electeds are uncomfortable even uttering those words. And that last item in the list sure has a familiar ring to it.

It’s a curious thing, this cultural contrast between Portland and Seattle. Demographically, the populations are almost indistinguishable. At the risk of overly generalizing, perhaps the most pertinent difference between the two cities is that Seattle is more “corporate.” Is it as simple as that?

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UPDATE: Here’s the pie chart that was mistakenly left out of the published article:

David Brooks—who doesn’t always suck—wrote in a recent column:

Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

Case in point—the Seattle Times editorial board’s take on the resignation of SDOT director Grace Crunican:

Mayor Greg Nickels refused to fire Crunican out of loyalty and a sense that her overall performance on projects such as “Bridging the Gap,” designed to improve roads and sidewalks, was done quite well. Maybe it was. But a crisis is the time when leaders prove themselves — and Crunican and her staff let down the decent, snowbound citizens of Seattle.

Translation: “maybe” mommy and daddy did a good job on the critically important, long-term challenge of transforming Seattle’s transportation culture, but who cares, cause mommy and daddy couldn’t wave a magic wand and make all the snow go away, and so the “decent” citizens of Seattle had every right to throw a tantrum.

So the question is, by pandering to this kind of infantilism, is the Seatimes editorial board simply reflecting the soul of Seattle? I’d like to think that they’ve got it wrong, that it wasn’t petty politics that took down Crunican, and that McGinn is letting her go only because he believes he can find someone who will be more effective at building sustainable transportation solutions for Seattle. Above all, I hope the latter proves true, but it’s going to be a tall order.

What fun it must have been excavating the 4-story underground parking garage for the new Starbucks building at 505 1st Ave S, as shown in the photos (thank you Scott at CD News). The spectacular mess they encountered—reportedly extending down as far as 40 to 50 feet—is typical of the fill that is found along the south waterfront, west of 1st Ave. It consists of leftover debris from the historic sawmills, along with the remains of the piles that once supported the piers and overwater railroad tracks that were built when the area was still a tidal flat.

The latest plan for the deep-bore tunnel moves the alignment from 1st Ave to Alaskan Way for the section south of Yesler Way. Which means the tunnel now has to traverse a massive underground heap of that unruly fill for about five city blocks.

Worth worrying about? Dunno. Perhaps deep-bore tunnel machines eat that kind of fill for breakfast. Perhaps the tunnel will be deep enough to go under it, and perhaps chewing a 54-foot diameter hole can be done without disturbing unstable fill above. Any experts out there care to weigh in?

If nothing else this a good example of the unanticipated complexities that inevitably arise when a mega-project starts to get real. For a good reality check on the potential challenges facing the deep-bore tunnel project, see Cary Moon’s recent Crosscut piece.* And this is why megaprojects so often go over budget. And this is why being on the hook for cost overruns matters.

But the bigger question this all circles back to is this: Why are we taking on the huge risk and expense of a piece of mega-infrastructure we don’t need?

[ Excavation at 505 1st Ave; photo: Scott Durham ]

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*Annoyingly, though alas, not surprisingly, the Crosscut editors headlined Moon’s piece “Tunnel Worries,” thereby framing it as the emotional ramblings of an amateur rather than what it actually is—that being serious analysis by one the City’s most knowledgable experts on the viaduct replacement issue.