Urban Geometry: Human Transit‘s Jarrett Walker argued that the transportation vision billionaire Elon Musk laid out failed to account for the basic geometry of urban roads, i.e. you can’t fit that many cars on them even if they are driverless. This one’s really been making the rounds so read it to help make your case whether we headed for technology-fueled utopia or some sort of sci-fi earthly inferno.
Microsurfacing: Seattle Bike Blog‘s Tom Fucoloro answered the mystery of the striping along the Missing Link. Answer: SDOT is microsurfacing the roadway to extend its life. It just didn’t publicize the project very well, leading some bicyclists to worry and wonder.
Permit Drag: Emily Badger with Wonkblog examined if slow permitting might be an even larger impediment to growth than zoning, and that’s saying something because zoning is a pretty big obstacle in many cities.
Unequal Equity Building: In City Observatory, Daniel Kay Hertz outlined how, by and large, home ownership falls short of its equity-building promise for low income and minority families and often fails as a wealth building tool.
Grandpa Trump’s Seattle Roots: Rob Ketherside explained in a Crosscut piece what we know from the historical record of Donald Trump’s grandfather Frederick’s time in Seattle where he was a restaurateur in the 1890s and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1892.
Bloated Bertha Bill: King 5 reported that the Bertha SR-99 tunnel project has ballooned by $223 million and will be done in 2019 at the earliest, three years later than originally planned.
Police Bias: Bryan Cohen with Capitol Hill Seattle Blog covered Councilmember Bruce Harrell’s bill aimed at codifying bias-free policing practices.
Integrated Care: CityLab‘s Eillie Anzilotti analyzed efforts to integrate health care delivery into affordable housing; some evidence suggests it could drive down costs while getting better outcomes.
Town Hall Towers: DJC reported Lennar Multifamily is planning to build two 32-story towers (with 550 residential units) in First Hill next to Town Hall Seattle cultural center.
Sad Mossback: Knute Berger lamented that UW’s Nuclear Reactor Building is headed for demolition despite some preservationists really wanting to keep it.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.