The Urbanist

For the ID station, I think the idea to bring Union Station back to life and use existing infrastructure to connect the multiple rail options at the same level is by far the best solution. It will pay dividends long-term. https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/04/16/better-transit-hub-people-union…

This is completely false. Read her classic, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She's trying to get at what makes cities work (variety and density). IIRC she talks about 100 units per acre as the right balance. This is what that looks like: https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ But yes, she was against destroying neighborhoods with freeways.

There is a throughput issue. Driverless cars with 4 people a car in a lane (or a bus lane) will do ~6000/people/hour if you are optimistic. A train 'lane' will on the other hand will do 32'000/people/hour. Non-bus lanes do 1500/hour, so a train is equivalent to a 21 lane highway, one way. [0] I think driverless cars are a great adapter / collector last mile technology for suburbs to go to the train station, but if somewhere has traffic problems now, it will have traffic problems with driverless cars too. After a certain point you need to put in trains. [0] https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/26/the-supply-and-demand-of-street…

The Chronicle article is worth reading but you can trust me that it points to capital markets and labor shortages as holding back approved projects. Here is a deeper analysis of the Seattle market with specific housing construction figures.[1] It argues "there is no general housing shortage, that the catastrophic figures above are a product of the Great Recession and the normal lag in construction. Because the market appears to be duly responding to demand, efforts to 'free' the housing market are not as effective as efforts to shape the market toward more just ends." This is consistent with the causes cited in the SF Chronicle article that hold back approved projects, as well as the SF Business Times(!) article pointing to the 2008 recession as a cause of the labor shortage, cited previously. [1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/11/22/what-housing-shortage/

Thanks for that! The article you link to as "some pretty persuasive criticism of Fischer’s initial model"[1] is also very good. One highlight: "These kind of responses miss the simple fact that of the three variables in Fischer’s model, only employment and wages really matter. (The demand-only model achieves an R squared value of .924 and adding the supply variable, housing units, gets us to .940)....Another found that the best model of San Francisco rents needs just one variable: wages (although wages and housing were a close second)." I think that kind of confirms my gut feeling on first hearing about the problem years ago: the issue is that there is too much money flowing into (a particular sector of) San Francisco. [1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisco-are-dete…

Looking for a proper study... I find articles like this are too obviously pushing a specific viewpoint [1]. They use hard data to come up with 900 passenger vehicles per hour on a single lane at 25mph times an average of 1.6 passengers per vehicle = 1,440 people per hour. Then they use hard data to come up with 50 buses / lane / hour. But then for the final calculation; “A 60-foot articulated low-floor bus typically has 65 seats and can carry 55 standees (per manufacturer specification) meaning that we get a throughput of 6,000 people per hour.” So they do the comparison based on every bus filled to absolute maximum capacity? But their own linked source claims average bus occupancy is 43 making the passenger volume 2,150. The DOT has a great passage on their site worth quoting in its entirety; The Bus Lane Paradox “Bus lanes can provide a strong identity for public transit. They can reduce travel time, but only if they are designed to work properly. A single curbside lane is rarely effective. Designs which are self-enforcing, which accommodate commercial deliveries, and which permit stopped buses to be passed by other buses can be most useful. However, such designs may occupy a significant amount of street space. Where traffic is severely congested, bus lanes can provide the biggest benefit to bus passengers, but it is precisely in these places where it may be difficult to reduce the amount of space available for general traffic— and thereby seem to worsen…

> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-bigger-upzone…

You are mistaken on the basic facts of where this permits more hosing. You also do now understand people in urban areas and their desires. For example look at Seattle, which has added a lot of population, but only added 1 car per 30 new people: https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/09/07/while-seattle-population-spikes… For a few generations, 99% of housing that was built was car dependent. That's not what the market wants. So when options are provided that allow living without a car, people flock to it.

It happened in WA two years ago as well, but Seattle dragged its feet as long as humanly possible in implementing a compliant zoning policy. https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/05/27/seattle-just-rezoned-the-entire…

Design review has been suspended for three years in downtown Seattle: https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/09/25/seattle-downtown-design-review-…

Sure - zoning laws are often a good thing! But you also have zoning laws like this regarding SRO units: https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/01/09/micro-apartments-could-become-f… Do you think zoning rules like this - that Washington state is currently trying to change - exist for valid reasons? I really don't see a good reason, other than `NIMBY-ISM`.

It’s generally unintentional. It’s rarely the case that the collision would have occurred had the driver been in compliance with the law. Road design is often a factor because the biggest thing which makes it a fatality is speed, and we have many roads where the speed limit is supposed to be 20-25mph but the design is like a much faster highway, causing almost everyone to go over the limit and thus have less time to react to anyone unexpected and hit them at higher speeds. This recent blog post was making the rounds based on Washington state data showing the speeding rate _in school zones_ was over 70%, which I think is what you’d find almost anywhere in the United States: https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/12/12/drivers-are-speeding-in-wa-scho…

It seems to me like the simplest solution would be to run all light rail through the existing transit tunnel. I know it would be a lot of traffic but they've said they can upgrade the signalling system to help. This article gives more information on this idea https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/02/07/build-ballard-link-faster-by-sk…

> "if you add more supply, the price goes down" drum, it doesn't seem to hold true in reality. Plenty of empirical, academic studies show it does hold true. See: https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/06/02/new-round-of-studies-underscore… But the numbers matter. Adding a tiny bit of supply is better than no supply, but won't help as much as a lot of supply.

Simultaneously: https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/02/07/one-stairway-is-enough-to-reach… There are building codes that are designed to increase authentic safety, and those that are actually trying to achieve other ends, like decreasing the supply of available housing, via the claim of "safety." "Safetyism" is everywhere: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/safetyism-is-the-water-in-which-w…

Over 80% of Seattle housing land is SFH. The "expanded rail" runs to non-walkable suburbs instead of filling out Seattle. Pretend we believed there was a climate crisis and decided to stop all cars. At our current rate of transit increase and our current population increase, I think we're at centuries before we'd even have the capacity. https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/06/01/correct-percentage-single-famil…

Neither do I, however WSDOT has not released any details on the project but their renderings indicate they want to widen the freeway to some 10+ lane monstrosity[1]. Meanwhile Cascadia High Speed Rail has ideas about replacing the existing BNSF/Amtrak bridge with a double deck four track + four care lane bridge in addition to the I-5 bridge[2]. This combined makes a ridiculous amount of car lanes and railway tracks, plus a redundant bridge. There must be a better—and cheaper—way to cross this river. 1: https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/02/18/dont-widen-highways-invest-2-bi… 2: https://cascadiahighspeedrail.com/portland-to-seattle/

Because the long term benefit of density ends up lifting the local economy a lot more than the property prices go down in the short term. Especially with remote work, the extra income brought in adds to the local coffee, haircut and food scene, and increased overall property taxes on the same land make the city money. People just don't think in that long a timeframe but there are localities which do and hopefully it works for them and we all get to learn the timeframe for benefits (or the lack of benefits) from such a change. https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/08/12/portland-passes-sweeping-zoning…

Here in Seattle the DOT is proud to salt the roads, in spite of the damage it causes to plants, cars and the dirty runoff it generates. Considering we didn't let a current mayor make it to the runoffs over his mishandling of snowmageddon a decade ago, I don't think SDOT will be considering modern salt alternatives anytime soon. It is kinda odd, in snowier rural Oregon they just used red rock cinders to deliver snow and ice traction effectively. But salt seems to be a lower effort solution? https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/02/06/seattles-salt-addiction/

Seattle cops similarly make bank. Of course, police pay is heavily effected by local cost of living, but Seattle cops make tons of overtime. I just learned there is a minimum three-hour overtime pay, meaning much of the overtime payout isn't even physically worked: https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/09/04/seattle-police-fleecing-city-wi…

But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? No, it doesn't. It means you need some apartments or similar in the mix, but it's really not that high a density level. These links might help you get a better idea of what we are talking about: https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

"25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings per hectare (4-5/acre) https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.

The City Council banned the ownership and use of chemical weapons and undirected crowd control munitions (e.g. blast balls) by the police dept (or their allies). The police were flooding residential areas with CS gas to the point that, at times, you couldn't see down a block. https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/06/16/seattle-council-bans-chemical-w…

The internet issue is a security one. Imagine what would happen if someone could make lights green in 2 directions. To the first point, the networked lights are already in this mode (it's the reason why they added it in the first place). I can't find the report right now but upgrading all of the signals on 2nd from Denny to Yesler cost something like 30 million bucks. The upgrade in the Mercer project area isn't exactly a glowing success: https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/09/06/eleven-ways-adaptive-signals-fr…

Sure, but why? The vast majority of the cost for a good rail system is in the dedicated right of way, overpasses for intersections and the stations, a BRT wouldn't be significantly cheaper. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-than-light-r…

The linked article below is about Seattle, not Sydney, but I expect that the cost breakdown is similar. Breakdown: 87% spent on new right-of-way plus 13% spent on light rail. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/10/12/brt-is-not-cheaper-than-light-r…

The Urbanist has an article on how modern rent control proposals differ from older ones, and the ramifications thereof: https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/08/05/the-case-for-rent-control/

In Seattle we have and are currently expanding a system of "RapidRide" buses. These appear to have an average stop distance of around 0.3 miles (~500 meters) Wikipedia claims that RapidRide routes have on average 40% fewer stops than the 'regular' line that they replaced, which would mean the 'regular' buses have stops about every 300 meters. Anecdotally, I lived in London for a few years and now live in Seattle, and I would say these number's all roughly match my experience. Seattle's stops are spaced quite a bit further apart, but Seattle is also much less dense :) see https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/03/26/rainier-rapidride-metro-seeks-s… and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidRide

According to Seattle.gov, most of the projects are on track with spending and the ones that aren't are the projects that are now uncertain about federal funding to offset costs, higher construction costs, and due to that a few went over budget [1]. You can't blanket apply this to all projects, even the ones in Move Seattle, therefore it's nothing but propaganda from people who don't want to spend anything on public infrastructure or public transit. Jenny Durkan is also quite the liar when it comes to the missing street car link [2]. [1] http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2018/04/23/the-latest-on-move-seattle/ [2] https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/07/26/mayor-durkan-claims-streetcar-w…

The mode share for downtown proper is 45% transit (31% drive alone). https://www.theurbanist.org/2015/02/25/commute-seattle-study-shows-onl…