Aug

9

Where is the TOD?

Filed Under Brownbag, Housing, Land Use, Transit, Zoning | Leave a Comment

Great City’s Leadership for Great Neighborhoods meets tomorrow at GGLO’s Space at the Steps to discuss the future of station area planning efforts. Our friend Roger Valdez opines on the state of local Transit Oriented Development, or the lack thereof, on the Seattle Transit Blog:

Amend Seattle’s land use code to get real Transit Oriented Development

by Roger Valdez

Roosevelt Night Life (Photo by author)

This summer has been good for land use and transit in Seattle largely because of the discussion—some would say argument—over appropriate density around the Roosevelt station area. Wednesday this week is a big day for Roosevelt, the Seattle City Council’s Committee on the Built Environment (COBE) is having a hearing on the subject and later that day Leadership for Great Neighborhoods is having a brown bag lunch discussion. The discussion in both places ought to include something about amending Seattle’s toothless station area overlay designation in its land use code.

Seattle hasn’t encouraged or even allowed true Transit Oriented Development. Any visitor to Beacon Hill will attest to the bizarre sight of a light rail station sticking out of the ground like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other station areas have yet to deliver on the promise of dense, walkable, housing and retail built around light rail stops. Why does Seattle lag so far behind places like British Columbia and Vancouver where there is lots of new housing around light rail?

Part of the problem is our single-family focused culture and economy. It’s easy to forget that one big private property interest in Seattle is single-family homeowners who benefit from attenuating the supply of housing. That’s not a slur, but a simple economic point. If housing is in short supply, then those who already own it benefit by keeping that supply limited. Diminished supply and increasing demand means existing homeowners can watch their property values increase …More

Apr

21

Save your bus!

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Help us Push Emergency Transit Funding Over the Finish Line

Help us save bus service in King County!  Last week, Senate Bill 5457 successfully moved out of the House!

The House made some changes and the bill went to a conference committee to negotiate the differences between the House and Senate versions. A compromise has been reached on the legislation in the conference committee. This is great news!

Now the House and Senate need to do one more “yes” vote on the legislation before it becomes a law. This is where you come in.

CLICK HERE to tell your State Senator and Representatives to pass Senate Bill 5457 one more time, the emergency transit funding act. Our transit riders and community as a whole can’t afford a reduction of 600,000 service hours at King County Metro.

Senate Bill 5457 would give emergency funding to King County Metro to help the stave off cuts equivalent in size to all of Metro’s service in East King County.

Spread throughout the system, such cuts would have dire consequences for the transit-dependent folks, many of whom reside in Seattle.

CLICK HERE and urge the officials you elected to pass the emergency transit funding act.

Apr

6

Seattle lawmaker may trip up King Co. transit bill – seattlepi.com

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An update from Olympia on one of our priorities for this legislative session, emergency funding to soften the impact of recession-induced cuts to service for those most transit-dependent:

A Seattle lawmaker is trying to kill part of a transit-assistance bill that requires a two-thirds majority approval by the King County Council before $20 license tab surcharges can be imposed for two years.

Rep. Reuven Carlyle, a Democrat, said he supports the “essential” additional financing that Senate Bill 5457 would provide but not the two-thirds local vote requirement it would impose on local officials.

Carlyle said it’s possible his move could kill the legislation, which barely cleared the Senate with the two-thirds requirement in it. He said he doesn’t take lightly the strong voter endorsement of Initiative 1053, which imposed the two-thirds requirement on state legislative tax and fee votes.

via Seattle lawmaker may trip up King Co. transit bill – seattlepi.com.

Mar

31

Westside light rail

Filed Under Streets for All, Transit, Transportation | Leave a Comment

We’ve had a lot to blog about in transportation news and commentary lately…

This is, by far, the most exciting nugget we’ve had to share. While it is just a start, it is movement in the right direction:

A light ballot measure for westside light rail

Unbowed by the gloomy budget news he dispensed this week, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn is still working toward his 2009 campaign promise to offer rail transit, linking West Seattle and Ballard to downtown.

The latest strategy, outlined in a letter from McGinn to a transit advisory group, suggests asking voters this year to approve just $10 million — enough money to complete 15 percent of the design for an 8-mile line. Taxpayers already are being asked this fall to double the Families and Education Levy right after a recession.

“The level of design work funded would allow us to seek federal grants for construction, as well as develop a timetable for a larger ballot measure to fund construction,” says McGinn’s message to Kate Joncas, Downtown Seattle Association director, and Ref Lindmark, a King County transit planner who helped plan the 2006 “Bridging the Gap” measure to improve city roads and bicycle-pedestrian travel.

via Politics Northwest | A light ballot measure for westside light rail | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Mar

29

Seattle Transit Blog: Can Rail Cause Sprawl? | PubliCola – Seattle’s News Elixir

Filed Under Transit, Transportation | Leave a Comment

Deeper into the conversation about transit service expansion and sprawl:

Seattle Transit Blog: Can Rail Cause Sprawl?

On Seattle Transit Blog today, Andrew Smith asks: Can rail lines between suburbs and cities actually cause the kind of sprawl transit is ostensibly supposed to help prevent?

The argument that it can, basically, is this: If you build rail lines out to sprawling suburbs, like highways, they’ll drive more people to live far away from cities, prompting expanded suburbs (and exurbs) with single-family, car-dependent development and zoning patterns that require people to own cars and drive just about everywhere. (Josh made a version of this point in Fizz the other day, when he argued that a state grant for commuter trains to Lakewood constituted a victory “for sprawl over density.”)

STB, however, makes a convincing case that in places like the Puget Sound region, rail is both necessary and unlikely to result in the sort of development that we would consider sprawl. (First Hill, STB notes, was considered sprawl in the Victorian era, and streetcar suburbs like Ballard would count as sprawl by the standards of the era in which they were built).

via Seattle Transit Blog: Can Rail Cause Sprawl? | PubliCola – Seattle’s News Elixir.

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