King County Metro recently unveiled its final proposal for a bus restructure in parts of North Seattle and North King County as well as a second round bus restructure proposal for Capitol Hill and First Hill. Those efforts are meant to complement the Lynnwood Link Extension and R … | Continue reading
Reliability issues caused the switch to longer headways for the remainder of the SoDo maintenance project. Sound Transit is the midst of maintenance work in SoDo to address flooding issues on light rail tracks near Stadium Station. The agency is single-tracking trains between Pio … | Continue reading
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has announced plans to install automatic traffic enforcement cameras at three locations to enforce dedicated transit lanes and intersection blocking, taking further advantage of a pilot program authorized by the state legislature in … | Continue reading
Traffic camera enforcement technology isn’t popular among motorists, but there’s a lot of but upsides to camera enforcement of traffic regulations, such as speed limits. Dave Amos of City Beautiful dives into the lifesaving technology. Amos also highlights other lifesaving techno … | Continue reading
Preston Anderson said he was inspired to run for Seattle City Council seeing firsthand the failure to adequately address homelessness and how it was affecting his patients, many of who are homeless veterans. “So I’m a clinical social worker,“ Anderson said during a recent intervi … | Continue reading
SPU oversteps their authority per state law and overcharges developments for new water service connections. Here’s how to fight back. It is time to take action to prevent Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) and and other agencies from mandating egregious and non-code-supported project … | Continue reading
Nathan Vass will be joining The Urbanist Book Club on Tuesday, April 4 at 6pm. Sign up is available here. And you can pick up his book, The Lines That Make Us, which we will be discussing. I can still see fairly well without my glasses, but I can’t make out faces at a distance. [ … | Continue reading
It ain’t much, but that’s all the Board’s going on too. This week, the Sound Transit Board of Directors will be deciding on preferred Ballard Link alignments and station locations. Some are still up-in-air, with the most critical ones in the Midtown-to-I-90 segment. Impacts to th … | Continue reading
For years, West Coast cities have been facing a housing emergency, as chronic under-building of housing met massive demand, spurred by good jobs and the high quality of life that we all l… | Continue reading
Few things perfectly encapsulate the problems of planning like a city’s land use code. Unlike the building code, which dictates the life safety requirements to make sure a building doesn’t burn dow… | Continue reading
Density is a controversial subject in virtually all American communities. While some districts and communities are seeking more density to promote economic revitalization and a host of other progre… | Continue reading
This is a two-part series. The first part is a very brief overview of the Growth Management Act, King County’s Urban Growth Boundary, and how we ended up with neighborhood plans. The … | Continue reading
This summer saw two published pieces that are at the center of the struggle over housing in the United States–entrenched, well-off homeowners averse to new neighbors, versus seemingly everyon… | Continue reading
Phoenix, Arizona is about to vote on a ballot measure intended to sabotage light rail expansions. A Valley Metro Rail extension to South Phoenix set to open in 2023 would be the first casualty, but… | Continue reading
Modern American streetcars have a bad rap. Partially this is self-inflicted. Several American transit agencies have planned streetcars doomed with routes that are too short, illogical, mixed with traffic, and infrequent. Immediately expected to succeed, first-time streetcar agenc … | Continue reading