Doug Trumm
Doug Trumm is The Urbanist's Executive Director. 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. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.
Seattle Subway has proposed an alternative to Sound Transit 3 (ST3) called "STcomplete" that would double the project timeline from 15 to 30 years and allow Sound Transit to “complete” the network, rather than going back to the voters to approve further funds after first $15 billion is spent.
STcomplete...
Last week, I wrote about the progress of the highway funding bill through Congress. A few politicians—Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Rick Santorum—don't want to fund highways at the federal level any more, endorsing transportation devolution. I also talked about Chuck Marohn's Strongtowns no new roads message, which has...
Congress finally did something! It appears poised to pass a "six-year" transportation bill. In truth, the bill contains money for only three years and doesn't address the looming issue of rising construction costs and dwindling gas tax revenues due to increasingly fuel efficient cars. The highway funding bill is...
Seattle is essentially gaining a second downtown with the emergence of South Lake Union (SLU) as a business and residential center where it seems new high rises sprout on a weekly basis. But with our booming new downtown and thriving old downtown pulling in commuters from across the region, Seattle's transportation...
Last week, The Seattle Times came out against Proposition 1 (a.k.a Move Seattle). Tom Fucoloro with the Seattle Bike Blog ripped The Seattle Times editorial board (STEB henceforth) to shreds for the unsoundness of their argument; you can read about the benefits of Move Seattle here, most of which the STEB...
After reading Kristin Ohlson’s The Soil Will Save Us, I was tempted to pack up and head for the countryside to become an organic farmer. The promise of restorative no-till agriculture is so great that it could fully offset all human sources of carbon emissions with as little as...
One of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) committee’s 65 recommendations was that the city prioritize its surplus properties for affordable housing. That doesn’t appear to be happening. The Seattle Times ran a story on the 210 “orphan” properties the city owns that might be used for affordable...