Seattle's "Stay Healthy Streets": You can't even IMAGINE any of this ever occurring to Jeff Gahan, can you?

No, it can't even be imagined.

Consider this: Gahan's belated embrace of public art for the parking garage has resulted in a three-story-high Freudian anchor seal and gigantic paintings of automobiles. 

There are, and always have been, people near Gahan who actually do "get it." But in Nawbany, you can't keep it (your job) without ditching any practical urban aptitude that runs contrary to campaign finance's pay-to-play circle of remuneration.

Too bad. Some of them might have amounted to something. All they have to look forward to now is a lifetime of employment as bootlicking functionaries, maintaining Dear Leader's automobile supremacy until retirement.

Seattle to bar traffic from 20 miles of streets so residents can exercise, bike, by Kaelan Deese (The Hill)

Seattle to bar traffic from 20 miles of streets so residents can exercise, bike

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) announced Thursday that the city plans to permanently bar 20 miles of roads from car traffic to leave room for people to use bikes and walk.

According to a city spokesperson, the streets would be closed for thru-traffic only, allowing residents to still access their homes using vehicles and delivery companies to continue services.

The measure is part of a larger initiative that began in April called Stay Healthy Streets, a temporary relief program providing more space for residents to leave their houses while practicing social distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a press release.

"Safe and Healthy Streets are an important tool for families in our neighborhoods to get outside, get some exercise and enjoy the nice weather," Durkan said.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) said that areas chosen to be closed from car traffic include places with routes that connect foot traffic with essential services and food stops, as well as streets with low car ownership, according to a release.

"We've witnessed a 57% drop in vehicle traffic volumes accessing downtown Seattle during Governor Inslee's Stay Healthy, Stay Home order," SDOT said. "Finding new and creative ways, like Stay Healthy Streets, to maintain some of these traffic reductions as we return to our new normal is good for the planet, but is also good for our long-term fight against COVID-19."

Part of the initiative includes building better bike infrastructure such as bike lanes to improve mobility around the city and help reduce pollution in the process.

The Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board strongly supported the measures Durkan announced Thursday.

"All these actions together will help Seattle come back as a safer, healthier, and more climate friendly city," the board said in the release.

Team Gahan always doubles down on car-centrism, but "Seattle Tosses Out (the) Rulebook to Protect Pedestrians."

Just think about all those times when the bored of works enumerated the many splendid reasons why they couldn't (wouldn't) help make our streets safe.

Just think about city engineer Larry Summers' passive-aggressive protests -- but traffic flow, but INDOT, but whatever else springs to an obstructionist's mind.

Just think about how different it would be if their first response wasn't "here's why we can't and won't help" but "we'll find a way to help."

Just think if the latter constituted Jeff Gahan's instructions to pliant campaign donors like HWC Engineering, rather than deploying them to defend the car-centric status quo.

Just think if Greg Phipps had the chutzpah to disagree with his overlord to insist on making the situation better, rather than meekly accepting the status quo.

We'll stop there. After all, "just thinking" is precisely what they're not doing.

#FireGahan2019

Seattle Tosses Out Rulebook to Protect Pedestrians, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Seattle will begin adding safe crosswalks without first assessing if high numbers of pedestrians are going to use them — a direct contradiction of the nation’s road design Bible.

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices states that before communities can add a signalized crosswalk — a crosswalk with a traffic light — there must be at least 93 pedestrians that cross at the location every hour. If pedestrian traffic is insufficient, the manual will also allow a signalized crosswalk only if five pedestrians were struck by drivers (think about that) at that location within a year.

In recent years, some progressive transportation engineers have challenged this rule, noting it subordinates pedestrian safety to the speedy flow of car traffic. (Indeed, as transportation planners sometimes joke, you can’t determine the need for a bridge by measuring how many people are swimming across the river.)

In Seattle, the city’s lead engineer, Dongho Chang, announced that the city was “piloting a new approach” to crossings on its greenway system. The city will add the crosswalk and the signal and then count how many pedestrians cross and see if it reaches the threshold that the MUTCD recommends.

According to Chang, the first experiment — at Ballard Avenue — was successful.

Eventually, some engineers hope, Seattle’s experiment will push other cities to try a new approach and, eventually, encourage action by the national committee responsible for updating the MUTCD. It’s especially important given the sharp increase pedestrian fatalities in recent years.

Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct, and why "predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand."

Not that I'd expect Warren Nash or the Bored with Works to read this, but you should.

Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition), by Joe Cortright (City Observatory)

Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand

Seattle has finally closed its aging Alaskan Way viaduct, a six-lane double-decker freeway that since the 1940s has been a concrete scar separating Seattle’s downtown from Elliott Bay. In a few weeks, much of this capacity will be replaced by a new 3 billion dollar highway tunnel under downtown Seattle, but until then, the city will have to simply do without a big chunk of the highway system that circulates cars around downtown Seattle.

Losing a major freeway that carries nearly hundred thousand vehicles a day through the heart of the city will certainly cause a major disruption to the traffic. The Seattle Times confidently told its readers in early January to prepare for a traffic cataclysm: “the region can’t absorb the viaduct’s 90,000 daily vehicle trips and 30,000 detoured bus riders without traffic jams that likely will ripple out as far as [distant suburbs] Woodinville or Auburn.” Our friends at CityLab echoed the ominous rhetoric with a story headlined “Viadoom: Time for the Seattle Squeeze Traffic Hell.”

That’s pretty scary stuff. But two days into Seattle’s brush with carmaggedon how are things looking?

Fairly good, actually.

It may seem like a stretch to suggest that closing the Alaskan Way viaduct actually made traffic conditions in Seattle better, but in some respects, thats likely to be the case. Worried about getting caught in a traffic jam, it’s likely that many travelers postponed or re-rerouted their trips. If closing the viaduct reduces the number of trips to downtown Seattle, it reduces traffic on other streets as well.

Consequently ...

What road closures teach us about travel demand

So what’s going on here? Arguably, our mental model of traffic is just wrong. We tend to think of traffic volumes, and trip-making generally as inexorable forces of nature. The diurnal flow of 100,000 vehicles a day on an urban freeway the Alaskan Way viaduct is just as regular and predictable as the tides. What this misses is that there’s a deep behavioral basis to travel. Human beings will shift their behavior in response to changing circumstances. If road capacity is impaired, many people can decide not to travel, change when they travel, change where they travel, or even change their mode of travel. The fact that Carmageddon almost never comes is powerful evidence of induced demand: people travel on roadways because the capacity is available for their trips, when when the capacity goes away, so does much of the trip making.

If we visualize travel demand as an fixed, irreducible quantity, it’s easy to imagine that there will be carmaggedon when a major link of the transportation system goes away. But in the face of changed transportation system, people change their behavior. And while we tend to believe that most people have no choice and when and where they travel, the truth is many people do, and that they respond quickly to changes in the transportation system. Its a corollary of induced demand: when we build new capacity in urban roadways, traffic grows quickly to fill it, resulting in more travel and continuing traffic jams. What we have here is “reduced demand”–when we cut the supply of urban road space, traffic volumes fall.

Congratulations to Cafe 157 for emulating "Strawless in Seattle." Who's next?

Question: But what about when I'm driving?
Answer: You should be driving.

Kudos to Cafe 157 (157 E. Main, downtown New Albany).

This is something other establishments should get behind, although I'll never be able to forget the three criticisms that greeted NABC's million-dollar investment downtown at Bank Street Brewhouse in 2009:

Gasp -- no Diet Coke!
Gasp -- only crappy local wine!
Gasp -- NO SODA STRAWS!

Uh oh ... time for a rant.

It's like this whole notion of "resistance." Donald Trump is the by-product of a broken economic system, and as consumers, we buttress the system each and every day. To resist, we'll need to give something up -- to take something away from economic elites and capital accumulation.

Like plastic soda straws? Could be. It's an environmental issue, but also good practice in bringing principled weight to bear.

Tell you what. I'll be drinking adult beverages straight from the glass -- can you wake me when the "resistance" gets serious?

A Citywide Takeover by Lonely Whale

Leading Seattle businesses and cultural icons committed to incorporating marine degradable alternatives to single-use plastic straws resulting in the radical reduction of plastic straw consumption in Seattle. In September alone, 2.3 million single-use plastic straws were permanently removed from the city. On launch of Strawless In Seattle, the Mayor of Seattle announced that in July, 2018 Seattle will become the largest metropolitan city to ban the single-use plastic straw.

The first campaign of its kind, Strawless In Seattle supports Strawless Ocean's global initiative to remove 500 million plastic straws from the U.S. waste stream in 2017.

Meet Dongho Chang: "Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets."

A boy can dream. I had such high hopes for Larry Summers, and maybe he'll be able to rally, but in the end -- so predictably, and so sadly -- Jeff Gahan's dull mediocrity corrupts everyone and everything it touches.

We could have been contenders, alas. Meanwhile, try to imagine our city hall functionaries walking or riding bikes.

Can't do it, can you?

Perhaps they don't feel safe. If only they had some way of correcting this fear ...

Meet the man striving to make Seattle’s streets safer, more efficient, by David Gutman (Seattle Times)

Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets.

Dongho Chang’s Twitter feed is boring.

You want caustic political opinions or an endless cavalcade of bad news? Look elsewhere.

What you’ll get from Chang, the city of Seattle’s chief traffic engineer:

Pictures of plastic speed bumps outside a West Seattle elementary school. New crosswalks in Lake City. New curb ramps in South Park. Protected bike lanes all over the place.

Chang’s feed is a catalog of changes to Seattle’s street grid and urban landscape. Almost all those changes are small, but when taken together, they paint a picture of a city in transformation, one less focused on fast car travel and more focused on making streets safe and reliable for walkers, bikers, bus riders and drivers.

Seattle isn’t building many new streets these days. Chang, along with dozens of engineers and technicians, works to make the streets we have function better, rejiggering speed limits and lane lines, trying new ideas to make the streets more welcoming and more efficient.

The results, like them or not, are apparent: Seattle’s not getting easier for drivers anytime soon. But it’s one of the safest cities in the country for pedestrians. And while downtown neighborhoods have added 45,000 jobs in the last six years, the rate of drive-alone commuters has declined, and transit use has spiked.

The building pictured on that meme isn't fast-casual, penny-pinching, developer-driven architecture at all.

Above, I've refashioned a meme about "fast-casual architecture." Before linking you to an explanation of the visual, below is the actual meme. Recently it went viral.

What makes the meme relevant to New Albany? Our fast-casual Break Wind Lofts at Duggins Flats, that's what. Can an interim executive director of public housing afford one of those units?

Ironically, the structure pictured in the viral meme isn't faux luxury housing at all. Rather, it's low-income housing for seniors in a neighborhood of Seattle.

Here's the rest of the story.

The Story Behind the Housing Meme That Swept the Internet, by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

How a popular meme about neoliberal capitalism and fast-casual architecture owned itself.

The Providence Gamelin House opened its doors in Seattle in 2005. It was built to offer safe, affordable housing for low-income seniors in Seattle’s Rainier Vista neighborhood. To occupy any of the facility’s 77 units, residents must be ages 62 and older and earn below 50 percent of the area median income for King County in Washington. Most of them earn far below it: The average annual income for Gamelin House residents is $11,000.

For more than a decade this permanent supportive housing facility has served low-income residents of south Seattle. It’s their home. But the Providence Gamelin House only came into its own at the end of 2017, when an architectural rendering of the project was compelled into service as a meme. Specifically, as a housing meme, which is its own bucket for signifiers of our slide into late capitalism.

The meme surfaced wherever memes surface and spread however memes spread—idk. Eventually it found its way to the desk of Timothy Zaricznyj, director of housing for Providence Supportive Housing, the person who now oversees this alleged gentrification nightmare. (In fact, he manages 16 affordable-housing developments in Washington, Oregon, and California.) Zaricznyj was not exactly tickled. “They chose the wrong project, if they want to slam developers,” he says ...

 ... The fact that this meme depicts modest affordable housing—not penny-pinching, developer-driven Fast-Casual architecture—even inspired a meta-meme backlash ...

 ... The original meme is a vague critique of “architecture by bean-counters” (of which Seattle does not lack for examples) and developers’ thirst for transitional neighborhoods. The Gamelin House was the work of Michael Fancher, an architect who designed affordable housing across the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and ‘90s. But don’t blame Fancher: Affordable housing is subject to severe restrictions and even worse funding shortfalls.

Where are they in NA? "Yes, I'm the 'Business Candidate,' and Yes, I'm a Progressive."

This is somewhat the point I've been trying to make since local time began, though of course I'm no longer a business owner.

But Sara Nelson owns a brewery, and this makes me happy, even if I'm aware that not all brewery owners were Sandinista brigadistas.

Hmm. Maybe Seattle is different from New Albany?

Guest Editorial: Yes, I'm the "Business Candidate," and Yes, I'm a Progressive, by Sara Nelson (The Stranger)

Hi, everyone. My name is Sara Nelson, I’m running for City Council, and I’m the business candidate.

How did I — a former Sandinista brigadista who met her husband at the WTO protests — become the “business candidate?" Well, besides the fact that The Stranger and Seattle Times both agree on the label — a sure sign the stars are aligning — it’s really not a surprise. I do co-own a small business. My company, Fremont Brewing, has grown from three full-time employees to 55. I’m proud of that.

I’m also pretty vocal that I think our local small businesses need a seat at the table in politics. With more than 60 percent of King County’s private-sector workers employed by small businesses, they’re incredibly important to growing our economy, tackling affordability, and ensuring we don’t turn into Bellevue. I’m absolutely willing to be the candidate of progressive small business ...

Is it the Onion? News and Tribune? NA Confidential? Nah, it's just a Duggins-ism, 'cuz "New Albany approves bid to transform alley into 'more of a place.'"

It's getting creepy surreal, for real. 

Make no mistake: We're honored to have been the source of this idea (June of 2915, below), along with the inimitable David Thrasher, and even if neither of us will be getting a plaque.

Thrasher deserves all the credit, eh?

There's just one lingering question. Given the impact of a typical Ohio Valley summer's night, is covering those dumpsters going to be enough?

Wait -- we already asked this question, a year and a half ago. We like being prescient, especially when they don't know what the word means.

---

June 12, 2015
Seattle alleys, New Albany street pianos and the overdue purging of bureaucrats.

Photo credit: Hannegan Roseberry at Fb

I generally advocate thinking outside our self-imposed civic boxes, because New Albany has far too many of them, stacked somewhere out in the garage, creased and dusty, and filled with hoary rationales for non-activity that we've forgotten even exist.

We also have many suitable alleys, as outlined in is adaptive reuse saga from Seattle.

Seattle's Future Alleys Look Like Paradise, by John Metcalfe (City Lab)

When you peer into a downtown Seattle alley, you might see rats and people sleeping in dumpsters. That could change, however, as the city plans to turn some of these airless holes into charming, plant-filled utopias.

Against all odds, New Albany has a thriving restaurant and bar culture to consider, and consequently, while excitedly reading about alley renovations in Seattle -- and recalling the many "hidden" infrastructure places we possess in addition to these -- one sensation kept coming back to me.

Namely, the smell of dumpsters behind restaurants in a red-hot, humid Indiana summer. However, using spaces, making places ... I support the idea, and the possibilities are endless. In fact, apart from alleyways, we could do so much better here, and the first step simply must be liberating ourselves from thinking that the usual suspects and their same "officially" accredited agencies, commissions and political entities possess a monopoly on creativity.

They don't, and all too often they stifle grassroots artistic expression, placemaking and neighborhood revitalization.

As Hannegan Roseberry's experience with our gatekeepers at the Board of Works earlier this week illustrates, the cultural asphyxiation starts at the very top. Hannegan had an idea, and the bored's political appointees could barely stifle their yawns while flashing the usual reply: "It's not an option."

 ... Now, you may be wondering what this surely controversial project must be, considering the absolute breakdown of communication and complete avoidance it inspired: A street piano, painted brightly by teenage artists, sitting out on the street for all passersby to enjoy and experience. I know, contain your gasps of horror; the audacity of this citizen, to think she could so arrogantly prep a whimsical and creative project such as this and terrorize the streets of New Albany.

In all seriousness, my goal is to shed light on a far more concerning challenge than the fun and frivolity of a street piano: The piano is really beside the point.

New Albany must make government more accessible. It is absolutely inexcusable that a citizen with an idea and a passion for her community could be so absolutely and completely led in circles, shut out and shut down.

Tuesday mornings, 10 a.m. It's in need of a dose of glasnost.

Look it up, Warren.

Match-ups we want to see: NA's Bored of Public Works vs. the Seattle Gum Wall.

Photo credit: Oddity Central

My wife lived almost ten years in Seattle, and I can't believe she kept this factoid from me until just the other day.

The Seattle Gum Wall – A Sticky Attraction (Oddity Central)
One of the most offbeat attractions in the United States, the Seattle Gum Wall is also one of the most germ infected tourist spot in the world.

Located in Post Alley, under Park Place Market, the Gum Wall has its beginning in the early 1990s, when people, irritated that they had to wait in line to get tickets to the theater, stuck chewing gum on the wall. At first, they would use the gum to stick small coins to the wall, but in time, the tradition of the coins disappeared, and the gum remained.

Recently there was an intervention at the Gum Wall.

Seattle gum wall gets scraped, washed, by Vanessa Ho (Seattlepi)

Is it possible to rein in Seattle’s grossest, unplanned tourist attraction? Maybe.

KIRO 7 recently posted video of Seattle’s infamous gum wall getting pressure-washed, with rubbery wads sliding off the wall and onto the ground at Post Alley in Pike Place Market.

Why? Because the gum wall had gotten too large, spreading 40 feet past where it’s “supposed” to stop near the Market Theater box office ...

Just think of the liability ...

Seattle alleys, New Albany street pianos and the overdue purging of bureaucrats.

Photo credit: Hannegan Roseberry at Fb

I generally advocate thinking outside our self-imposed civic boxes, because New Albany has far too many of them, stacked somewhere out in the garage, creased and dusty, and filled with hoary rationales for non-activity that we've forgotten even exist.

We also have many suitable alleys, as outlined in is adaptive reuse saga from Seattle.

Seattle's Future Alleys Look Like Paradise, by John Metcalfe (City Lab)

When you peer into a downtown Seattle alley, you might see rats and people sleeping in dumpsters. That could change, however, as the city plans to turn some of these airless holes into charming, plant-filled utopias.

Against all odds, New Albany has a thriving restaurant and bar culture to consider, and consequently, while excitedly reading about alley renovations in Seattle -- and recalling the many "hidden" infrastructure places we possess in addition to these -- one sensation kept coming back to me.

Namely, the smell of dumpsters behind restaurants in a red-hot, humid Indiana summer. However, using spaces, making places ... I support the idea, and the possibilities are endless. In fact, apart from alleyways, we could do so much better here, and the first step simply must be liberating ourselves from thinking that the usual suspects and their same "officially" accredited agencies, commissions and political entities possess a monopoly on creativity.

They don't, and all too often they stifle grassroots artistic expression, placemaking and neighborhood revitalization.

As Hannegan Roseberry's experience with our gatekeepers at the Board of Works earlier this week illustrates, the cultural asphyxiation starts at the very top. Hannegan had an idea, and the bored's political appointees could barely stifle their yawns while flashing the usual reply: "It's not an option."

 ... Now, you may be wondering what this surely controversial project must be, considering the absolute breakdown of communication and complete avoidance it inspired: A street piano, painted brightly by teenage artists, sitting out on the street for all passersby to enjoy and experience. I know, contain your gasps of horror; the audacity of this citizen, to think she could so arrogantly prep a whimsical and creative project such as this and terrorize the streets of New Albany.

In all seriousness, my goal is to shed light on a far more concerning challenge than the fun and frivolity of a street piano: The piano is really beside the point.

New Albany must make government more accessible. It is absolutely inexcusable that a citizen with an idea and a passion for her community could be so absolutely and completely led in circles, shut out and shut down.

Tuesday mornings, 10 a.m. It's in need of a dose of glasnost.

Look it up, Warren.

"Changing the way we tax property to discourage speculation and encourage compact, infill development."

Another example of subversive thought lying somewhere outside the self-restricting box that local government prefers inhabiting. But wait: The Democrats are having a convention, and looking for innovative plat ... form ...

Never mind.

To Revitalize Downtowns, Tax Land Speculation: Five reasons to love land-value taxes, by Jerrell Whitehead and Clark Williams-Derry (Sightline Daily)

... So how is it that, even in the core of the Pacific Northwest’s largest metropolis, on some of the most valuable real estate within city limits, you can find so much land essentially still sitting idle?

One of the biggest reasons is also one of the most obscure: the structure of the property tax.

Under today’s tax rules, leaving a lot empty, or letting a building slowly rot, gives the property owner a light tax bill, thus allowing landowners to hold onto under-developed properties year after year after year. In essence, these land speculators become free-riders: their properties rise in value, sometimes dramatically, because of the hard-fought efforts by neighbors and city government to create vibrant and attractive downtowns. Yet many land speculators detract from the value of their neighborhood by leaving productive land derelict or by allowing buildings to disintegrate.

So what’s the solution to all this underutilized land? Perhaps the simplest one is an idea that’s been around since the late 1800s: changing the way we tax property to discourage speculation and encourage compact, infill development.

Seattle: A street doubling as a park. Can it be done here? Let's ask John.

NA Confidential asked John "The Rasputin of Redevelopment" Rosenbarger:

"Here in New Albany, where you've ceaselessly toiled for three decades amid the mouth breathers, would it be possible to shrink a two-lane, one-way street into a partial park without bonding $19 million from TIF?"

His interpreter provides the answer. 

Meanwhile, in Seattle there's an example ...

It's a park. It's a street. Is it safe?, by Marc Stiles (Puget Sound Business Journal)

 ... If you haven't been paying attention, construction crews from AGR Construction of Monroe have been working on Bell Street between First and Fifth avenues to make this road part street and part park ...

 ... You don't have to be an urban policy wonk to see how the $5 million project has significantly altered the character of the area. The two-lane, one-way street was a straight shot with parking on both sides. As part of an extreme "road diet," curbs were removed to create a flat surface the entire length and width of the right-of-way that today is dotted with planters and street furniture along the new roadway that slightly meanders and has just one lane for cars.

It's a grand experiment with the result being like no other street in downtown Seattle. Some people will love it, and some will hate it. Either way, expect to see more street parks in Seattle, where two similar projects already are under way ...

Heresy in New Albany: "Are Parking Meters Boosting Business?"

In the wake of a muddled New Albany municipal tradition of unofficial non-enforcement of downtown parking rules, the England Administration's hurried "solution" a couple years back was to officially muddle the non-enforcement regimen and (of course) declare its mission blissfully accomplished, which is to say that parking downtown henceforth would be entirely free of rules (and costs) even as police continued to issue tickets in other places, ones falling beyond an utterly invisible line that hasn't once been made clear to the public in all the time since.

Huzzahs were unleashed, red wine decanted straight from the box, and the Central Committee went back to millennial snoring.

Last week, Bloomington was in the news: Bloomington council OKs revised parking meter plan (Associated Press, via IBJ).

It's a plan to balance metered spaces with garage and "free" spaces, and by way of explanation, Mayor Mark Kruzan said something entirely unimaginable in New Albany.

"The message is not revenue, it's behavior."

Ye Gods, just imagine it. Actually thinking a problem all the way through, even if a proposed solution seems counter-intuitive at first, and stepping outside the self-imposed box.

Are Parking Meters Boosting Business? More evidence that business receipts rise with parking costs, by Eric de Place (Sightline Daily)

... How is that possible? Can higher parking costs actually boost business?

It may sound counter-intuitive at first, but on inspection it turns about to be totally sensible. By increasing turnover in on-street parking and ensuring that spaces are available for customers, well-calibrated parking policies really can increase patronage. (After all, would you rather grind through congested downtown streets in the rain while hunting for a parking space or pay a few bucks to stash the car curbside until 8?) In fact, boosting business is exactly what Seattle set out to do when officials adjusted meter rates and extended paid hours downtown.