Jan

23

shovel ready?

Filed Under Alaskan Way Viaduct, Community, Environment, From A to Green, Innovation, Neighborhoods, Parks, Pedestrians, Spokane St. Viaduct project, Streets For People, Transit, Transportation, Zoning | 3 Comments

Is anyone else sick of hearing the phrase ‘shovel ready’ in reference to stimulating the economy and rehabilitating our infrastructure? Most projects that are truly shovel ready (drawings, check. permits, check. fire up the bulldozer!) aren’t what will truly aid the regeneration of 21st century cities. They are very likely to be things like road widenings and interchanges that fuel sprawl and shred urban fabric. Some estimates suggest that three quarters of infrastructure stimulus funding will be for roads. The other quarter will be used to buy the silence of all us bike, tree, transit, urbanism, art, ped, waterfront, etc. advocates. We’ll all get in line and try to get a few good things done with the crumbs from the stimulus table, but can’t we HOPE for more?

Republicans are already rallying around giving more money to rich people instead because even the shovel ready projects can’t get started until 2010. I saw a CNN interviewer chew out a mayor that requested money for parks and trails in his city’s stimulus package. She asked him if he was ashamed of himself since everyone knows those aren’t ‘real’ infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. Frankly, i’d rather leave our economy a little less stimulated than waste the resources of many generations on the shovel ready road projects cluttering the shelves our our state highway departments.

Eighty years ago the united states stimulated itself out of a depression, but also made civic art of our public works. will a random-ass extra lane to redmond be viewed as such eighty years from now? And don’t forget that after this splurge funding of all types, perhaps for decades, will be diminished to pay for this bump. Whether we get it right or wrong now, we’ll be paying for it for a long time to come. So it is time for all urban and environmental minded folks to remind our politicians that great projects in this day and age-reconnecting seattle to a healthy puget sound, mass transit and mobility options, vibrant neighborhoods, and a robust network of green infrastructure-are complex in a good way. They will need talented artists, NGOs, designers, engineers, lawyers (yes, even them), inventors, community organizers, legislators, and developers to make sure the bulldozers and shovels are headed in the right direction on the right projects. If we want to strengthen the economic and environmental foundations of cities for the long-term, we don’t want to waste this opportunity on what happened to be shovel ready in the panic of 2008. we need pencil ready, people ready, carbon ready, future ready!

I’d be interested in your thoughts on how we can shift the messaging on this subject.

Jan

13

If you think all swans are white…

Filed Under Alaskan Way Viaduct | Leave a Comment

Yesterday Governor Gregoire, Mayor Nickels, and County Executive Ron Sims, announced that they would support a new underground freeway as a replacement for the Alaska Way Viaduct. Later that same evening Peter Newman spoke at City Hall about Resilient Cities, and how to prepare for Peak Oil and beyond. While I absolutely love this city, I have never been more ashamed of Seattle than while listening to Newman speak.

The three elected officials who endorsed the tunnel proposal have all talked about their commitment to better transportation alternatives. In 2008, Mayor Nickels started the Give Your Car the Summer Off Campaign which promoted bicycling and walking in the city through the warmer months. Ron Sims has always been a proponent of more transit dollars, fighting to win the money for Transit Now! which added hundreds of hours to King County bus service. And Governor Gregoire signed into law, Bill SB2815, which promised to reduce per capita VMT.

Unfortunately when it came to the Seattle Waterfront, an incredible opportunity to redesign our city around alternatives to personal vehicles, these leaders decided to take the safe route and endorse a plan that catered to everyone’s desires. The plan adds a nice landscaped parkway to our waterfront that pedestrians can enjoy, and buries the current freeway underground, out of the public eye. We’re adding a whole ton of light rail, so can’t we just keep one little freeway?

Unfortunately that freeway is not cheap. With a pricetag of over $2 billion it’s an incredibly large amount of money that now, cannot be used to improve public transit or other alternatives to motor vehicles. In fact, with that money, we could fund the entire Streetcar Network, finish the Bicycle Master Plan, Implement four BRT routes, add 400 hybrid buses to Metro’s fleet, add 1,500 blocks of sidewalks, and build 27,000 affordable housing units in transit friendly areas. Instead, we have decided to makes sure that people can get from West Seattle to Ballard a few minutes faster.

What kind of priorities are these? What kind of city does this makes us look like? Seoul, South Korea removed an enormous central freeway and resurfaced a beautiful river with park land on both sides. And yet, we can’t even move 1.3 miles of freeway to surface streets? Seattle always applauds itself for being a green, progressive city but we are undermining our future by failing to see the needs of the 21st century.

Peter Newman began his lecture yesterday with the story of the Black Swan. Explorers first encountered the black swan in Western Australia but couldn’t believe it was a swan because they had only seen white swans before. The Black Swan is now a symbol for the unpredictability of the world. It shows that you can’t plan for the future, simply by relying on the past.

Our leaders promote alternative transportation when its easy, but during the most difficult decisions, the ones where we rely on their wisdom and foresight most, they are failing us because they think all swans are white. They think that because cars have been such an integral part of Seattle transportation for generations they must necessarily remain a major part in the future. If we don’t start thinking about a different future, a new future with a new model for how we conduct our lives in the urban environment, I guarantee that the Viaduct decision will not be the only opportunity squandered.