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Welcome to Seattle
Seattle’s Mayor, Jenny Durkan, held a town-hall meeting in Lake City, in North Seattle. Here is a bit of what happened (from the KOMO web site):
“The city government works for the people, and more and more these days there’s more disconnect between people and their government,” Mayor Durkan said. “I think it’s really important to get into communities and listen to what’s working, what’s not working, how we can get better.”
Mayor Durkan spent an hour talking and taking questions.
“What are you guys going to do to make sure they don’t get these permits to build unless they put in parking?” a community member asking during the meeting.
“I know it’s an answer that not everyone will like, but the first thing we have to do is build better transit everywhere we can,” she added.
Her answer to the community member who asked the question was, essentially, we do what we want, not what you want. What was that again about the government working for the people?
Published in Politics
The Mayor’s name reminds me of an old Irish song,
“Good-bye Mrs. Durkin, I’m sick and tired of workin,
No more I’ll dig your pratties, no longer I’ll be poor!
As sure as my name is Barney,
I’m off to Californy.
Instead of diggin pratties I’ll be diggin lumps of gold!”
“We’re here for you, but we don’t care what you think.” Does that sum it up?
Seattle is not Manhattan. Lake City is pretty far from downtown and even if you can take mass transit to work you would likely still want a car for other purpose (getting groceries, etc.). Even with better mass transit, you will still need parking in residential areas if you are adding more apartments.
You used her name in the ditty spelled with an i. Her name is spelled with an a. That makes her odds on to be a relative. There is a town in Country Mayo Ireland where the name is spelled both ways. Usually people do not claim any kinship with the other spelling unless asking to borrow money. Her father immigrated from Mayo as did my Grandpa. It’s a shame she is such a socialist, otherwise I could ask for a key to the city if I visited.
Cheese, you definitely do NOT want the key to “homeless encampment” city.
That’s so they can say, “You didn’t build that.”
Heck with the key to the city – ask her for money!
The mayor was being disingenuous about parking (this is my shocked face.) The Prog agenda works like this:
• Mandate a certain number of parking spaces per unit
• Grant waivers to politically favored developers… for a fee
• Sell neighborhood parking permits to residents with cars who can’t find a place to park
• Collect parking ticket revenue from cars with no residential permits (using public employee union labor)
• Massively increase housing density on transit corridors – without providing parking
• Reduce the number of traffic lanes on these streets to install bike lanes while otherwise engineering the streets, bus stops, and sidewalks to impede traffic flow, thereby displacing traffic into surrounding residential neighborhoods which become heavy traffic arteries
Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is not a joke. Over the years I’ve lived in this area, I’ve lived through two cycles of transportation improvement initiatives that mostly consisted of adding more bus service, which were later cutback when they didn’t get the use that was projected. Buses can’t cover everywhere, but the current approach is to invest long term in surface and elevated trains (streetcars, link trains, etc.) which are even more restricted in where they can go, which will only increase pressure on people who don’t live nearby to use their cars to connect with them, or otherwise depend on the marginal bus infrastructure to connect from real neighborhoods where real people live to the shining architectural gems that the train stations and their environs (think Northgate mall station under current construction and South Lake Union campus where Amazon.com is) will become (someday, years after we’re retired), unless they run out of money that is…
On that subject, Seattle might have a trend of not finishing projects. When I arrived in the 1980’s, there were a handful of elevated ramps that stopped in midair that looked like they had been that way for years. These ramps were eventually torn down when they redid the ramps to coincide with more updated plans.
You WILL use public transportation and you will LIKE it.
That’s all the time we have for questions ( her limo is double parked I guess).
MONORAIL!
Just wait until you read what the Washington State Department of Transportation and Seattle have in store for us in the coming years. From the Web site of the Washington Policy Center. It’s unreal.
To support its vision of what transit should be, the state Dept. of Transportation is creating policies to restrain technology advancements such as autonomous vehicles. Mariya Frost with the Washington Policy Center wrote, “If you are an individual commuter and were hoping the new technology would provide you with a more bearable commute, WSDOT wants you to think again.” (Washington Policy Center)
Todd Herman of KTTH Radio has been harping on this for a long time.
Unreal. The whole way transit and traffic departments have been infiltrated by idiots who hate cars is almost certainly criminal.
Ha! Once upon a time (the monorail is a working artifact of the 1962 World’s Fair), the monorail represented a possible future of transportation, maybe not for Seattle, but somewhere. It still works, but has its occasional problems when two trains try passing in opposite directions on the stretch of track where it curves. But it gets use by tourists going between Seattle Center and Westlake Center in the main part of downtown Seattle. The thing is, some years ago a private developer proposed to extend the line further into the downtown. It had the advantage of not competing with the street level lines. One of the points against it was the difficulty of acquiring the needed right-of-ways for the trestles so close to buildings. I could understand the logistical difficulties for that, not to mention the complexity of the earthquake engineering involved. But I think the real thing that killed it was that almost everyone in government around Seattle opposed it for the reason that it would generate profits to a private entity or group of investors. The idea was abandoned.
I used to live across the street from Seattle Center, in the one place taking the monorail anywhere (well, it only goes one place). I used to take it a fair amount
I remember when the proposal to extend the line was floated, and knew it was going nowhere. Seattle loves its buses too much.
There is only one mode of transportation that can go from exactly where I am to where I want to go, the automobile. Any form of mass transit is therefore inefficient in terms of my time. But then again, my time means nothing at all to these planners.
In Victoria, Canada recently we took a city bus from our rented cottage to downtown V. to rent a car. The trip took an hour and 15 minutes by bus and 25 minutes coming back in the car. Traffic was light both times but the bus took a rather circuitous route with many stops as it should.
I noticed the bus service was well used and the customers seemed of a reasonably prosperous working class, mostly youngish some with children. I’d call this a successful mass transit system. However, why do planners and liberals not care when transit costs more time that necessary for individuals? There is nothing more valuable or limited than time.
Before they can get you out of your car, they must get you out of your single-family home with a yard. They have already begun that in Seattle. The city is working on “upzoning” Seattle neighborhoods to allow more multi-family housing. The people in those neighborhoods are mightily objecting but, as we have seen, the government is more powerful than the neighborhoods (people), and they will win. The people of Seattle simply cannot see that they are responsible for this, as they elect their city council.
They’ve learned much from the draconian Oregon land use laws. The benefit is that it artificially inflates property rates. A benefit if you already own the property, that is.
Gee, thanks Tom McCall!
I bet it’s a twofer: mandate low income units (including Section 8) as a certain proportion of the units in the multi-family housing.
Guaranteed. And I guarantee certain Council members receive contributions from the developers “chosen” to build the glorified slums AND that certain of their family members receive job offers from said developers in various capacities.
It’s called “pay to play”, folks, and if you get caught, sucks to be you. You just weren’t clever enough.