Cascadia Report

Category: Cascadia not cities

  • The decisions that made a great city

    Vancouver, often named one of the world’s most livable cities, didn’t get that way by accident. It took a series of not-so-obvious decisions.

    metropolitan Vancouver; from royalbcmuseum.bc.caA former British Columbia premier and a longtime urban planner just released a book describing their list of nine key turning points. Apparently their point is that currently planned transportation and development projects in Vancouver now threaten to undo many of those successes.

    There’s little in the book about Vancouver’s “irritating and potentially dangerous sense of self-satisfaction,” according to The Tyee. But the list is still fascinating:

    — Creation of a regional planning board after a 1948 flood forced officials to prepare for potential disasters.

    — The battle in the 1960s against plans to tear down urban neighborhoods and build in-city freeways.

    — Creation in the 1970s of an a regional reserve of agricultural land.

    — Regional planning based on neighborhood “livability” starting in the 1970s.

    — Remaking of the False Creek area after Expo 86.

    — A series of laws in the 1980s and 1990s mandating regional planning.

    — Creation of a regional transportation agency.

    — Shifting power and responsibilities to local government, away from the province.

    Some of the elements of regional planning were also implemented in Portland. Seattle’s list is much shorter, including regional water service decades ago, the package of 1960s reforms that created bus-transit system and cleaned up sewage, and the beginnings of regional transit in the 1990s.

    Across Cascadia, the combining regional planning for infrastructure and local buy-in for neighborhood decisions still seems the best bet for coordinating new growth. It’s worth considering this list of mistakes the book’s authors came up with when asked by the Vancouver Sun:

    1. Lack of authority in the regional government to enforce development near transit.

    2. Slum clearance in the 1950s and 1960s.

    3. Keeping the rural grid pattern south of the Fraser River, which makes density and transit difficult.

    4. Allowing business-park sprawl.

    5. Allowing the proliferation of underground malls that robbed streets of pedestrians.

    6. Getting rid of the region’s interurban rail and streetcars, which destroyed a comprehensive transit system and promoted more car use. The last interurban stopped in 1958.

    7. Not containing the sprawl into farmland sooner.

    8. Failing to consider sooner whether the region needed a vast rail system.

  • How to fix Seattle Center (and help Bumbershoot)

    Pumping some new life into the Bumbershoot festival should be incentive for fixing the outmoded Seattle Center, the main park in the middle of the city.

    BumbershootYes, some of this year’s shows were great. On Saturday I loved The Gourds at Mural Amphitheater (“Starbucks Stage”) and The Moth at Bagley Wright Theater. But The Shins’ show suffered from awful sound in Memorial Stadium — not to mention a lack of drinking water and super-strict airport-style crowd control.

    At risk of sounding like a geezer, I have to say it used to be better. For $5 you could spend the day chancing across new music and art, plus maybe catch a great headliner. I’ll always remember hearing Miles Davis at the old Opera House in 1987.

    This year the walk-up tickets were $35, which kept the crowds in check. While fighting the economics of the music business is probably a lost cause, we can rejuvenate the place by remodeling the Seattle Center. (There’s a simple summary of the options on this story.)

    What can be done? Replace Memorial Stadium with a real amphitheater, replace the Fun Forest with usable green space, retool Key Arena and modernize the Center House. But don’t stop there. Let’s make the place accessible by running the new streetcar from South Lake Union past the Seattle Center to the existing line on the waterfront.

    Extra open space, some better facilities and more efficient access would go a long way toward restoring the Seattle Center and Bumbershoot. That might even make them better than ever.

  • Another “most livable” ranking

    Vancouver residents might be frustrated with traffic and high rent but don’t tell The Economist, which just named the city as the most livable in the world.

    Such an accolade for Vancouver isn’t really news. But it’s curious because it’s based on a weighted index of 40 factors such as congestion, crime and cultural assets. Reportedly Melbourne fell to No. 2 because of congestion. The top U.S. cities were Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

  • Who wants to ride these old trains

    Never mind the snazzy drawings of Acela trains below — service in Cascadia is getting a temporary setback while Amtrak deals with equipment problems.

    On Saturday I was driving north on a (very congested) I-5 near Nisqually when one of the Cascades trains passed overhead. But instead of the modern Talgo trains that make traveling between Vancouver and Eugene so comfortable, it was a train of three old Amtrak cars.

    The Talgo cars are out of service until December, reportedly because of cracks in their suspension. Using old equipment is better than having an accident. But it means less capacity and it certainly makes the trip less pleasant, with the elimination of the business-class car option.

  • Following the region’s skyscraper growth

    It’s old news that Portland’s skyline is growing. Here’s a cool tool to see it.

    Obviously Cascadia’s cities aren’t alone. Here’s a look at how some of it may be funnelled in downtown Seattle. And in Vancouver.

  • Airline snafus boost support for rail

    The combination of airline delays and Amtrak’s increasing ridership is generating goodwill that could lead to more support for passenger rail, according to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal.

    Acela trainOver the last 10 months, ridership on Amtrak’s fast Acela trains in the Washington-Boston corridor is up 20% — “enough new passengers to fill 2,000 Boeing 757 jets.” Ridership in the Chicago-St. Louis corridor is up 53% in the 10 months through July, the paper said. It could’ve mentioned recent gains in Cascadia too.

    Hopefully this trend eases some opposition to investing in rail. Then we could talk about breaking up the Amtrak monopoly and introducing more market forces aimed at improving passenger rail rather than dismantling it.

    The article suggests some encouraging signs:

    “You have to begin to put the infrastructure in place to put in high-speed trains,” says Gordon Bethune, who retired in 2004 as chief executive of Continental Airlines Inc. “It should be a national priority. If the French can do it, why can’t we?”

    Another airline-industry legend Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines parent AMR Corp., says improvements to Amtrak’s network in the Northeast are one of the best ways to reduce aviation gridlock.

    In Cascadia, it’s going to be a long process — even in Washington, which has funded some rail improvements. Among other things, we need more support from the B.C. government to speed the Seattle-Vancouver corridor.

  • Learning from another West Coast downtown

    I just got around to reading this Steve Lopez column about the booming development in downtown Los Angeles. There’s plenty we could borrow, like pocket parks and integrating transit.

    We’re all for letting market forces drive development, but we could use some vision for coordinating projects in our own cities.

  • The case against biofuel as energy solution

    I saw a biodiesel VW on the road today and the green part of me said I should get one of my own to help cut oil consumption. The rest of me says truly cutting pollution and energy use is a lot more complicated.

    Biofuel production — such as the new plant in Hoquiam — surely makes sense as part of an array of energy alternatives. But it seems we’re likely to accomplish more by guiding more efficient consumer behavior through incentives.

    Consider this editorial in today’s L.A. Times laying out the case against ethanol, a corn-based biofuel that’s winning attention from politicians of all stripes ahead of the caucuses in Iowa. The article points out the environmental costs and makes a convincing case for fuel economy standards instead.

    Meanwhile an Oregon State University study found that the cost of biofuels, including tax subsidies, is many times more than alternatives such as increased fuel efficiency.

  • Don’t forget to vote

    Tuesday is the primary election in Washington. Since I’ve been asked, here’s how I voted.

    For Seattle-area races, take a look at the Municipal League’s ratings. I considered the League ratings (I participated in the final ratings), media reports and my own views:

    Seattle City Council — I’m looking for new ideas and signs that a candidate can actually build consensus and take action. Challenger Joe Szwaja in Position 1 and Venus Velazquez for the open seat in Position 3 seem most promising.

    Port of Seattle — The Port needs more stringent oversight, which led me to pick Gael Tarleton (who has a financial-management background) for Position 2 over incumbent Bob Edwards. In Position 5, incumbent Alec Fisken has been a tenacious agitator for transparency so deserves another term.

    King County Prop. 1 and Prop. 2 — I’m a huge fan of parks and zoos, which would benefit from these property tax measures. But I don’t support the mechanism behind them. Parks and zoos aren’t the lowest priority of county residents so shouldn’t be the also-ran issues that the government puts on the ballot almost as afterthought. I don’t want to be asked about funding every government priority — we elect representatives to weigh priorities and to make the case for more overall funding if that’s required. These levies continue a bad habit.

  • They hate us for our brie, coffee and wine

    The rift between the two sides of the Cascade mountains is well known. Now there’s a new bone of contention: food.

    Apparently the “100-mile diet” is catching on in Seattle, where some people aim to cut pollution by sourcing their food locally instead of shipping it from far away.

    An editorial in the Tri-City Herald pokes fun at the whole idea. It misses the point, of course. But it’s still better than the infamous 2000 vote by the Seattle city council in favor of removing the Snake River dams. No wonder it’s so hard to build consensus for development and infrastructure in the state.