Search Results
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Growing Seattle Ups the Ante on Green and Complete Streets
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E-scooters Could Be One Way to Fund Better Protected Bike Lanes
Last month, I argued that the answer to problems of the e-scooter revolution will be bike lane infrastructure. And it makes sense for cities to charge hefty scooter fees—shared e-scooters seem to be extremely profitable due to indefinite public storage space—as long as the money gets reinvested in protected bike lanes. Last week, North America’s largest e-scooter startup, Bird, announced a voluntary plan to donate $1 per scooter, per day...Read more » -
Portland’s Street Design Experimentation Creates a Redrawn Paradigm
Editor’s note: This is Part 3 in a four-part series on how trees and plants help to slow traffic, ameliorate climate change impacts and make growing cities more livable. Read Part 1, which lays out the overall case for better street design, here. Read Part 2, which focuses on Vancouver and its green efforts in busier and denser areas, here. Time travel with me to 1973 Portland. The state legislature has just...Read more » -
Thanks to Comprehensive Street Design, Vancouver Sows for the Future
Editor’s note: This is Part 2 in a four-part series on how trees and plants help to slow traffic, ameliorate climate change impacts and make growing cities more livable. Read Part 1 here. When it comes to cultivating plants and walkability together, Vancouver, BC, over the last two decades has reaped a harvest of low-hanging fruit on its residential streets. Today, though, the city is looking to plow new ground...Read more » -
More Homes, All Shapes and Sizes, for All Our Neighbors
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part summary of housing affordability messaging recommendations resulting from Sightline Institute focus group testing. Find part 1 here. Sightline has conducted two rounds of focus groups to expand our understanding of Seattle attitudes about the burdens and benefits of growth, hopes and dreams for the kinds of places people want to live, and a menu of possible affordability solutions. In the second...Read more » -
Portland’s Scooter Tax Is Super High, and That’s Fine
If car-dependent cities are bad, and they are, then shared e-scooters are good. You may have heard that private shared e-scooters—parked alongside the sidewalk by each successive user, waiting to be located and rented with the smartphone of the next—are the new hotness in the rapidly expanding universe of battery-powered “micromobility.” In the last 14 days, shared scooter fleets have launched in Dallas, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Milwaukee and...Read more » -
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now: How Neighborhoods Can Kick Car Habits
This is part two in a three part mini-series about how accessory dwelling units—in-law apartments and backyard cottages—change the urban carbon footprint. You can read part one here. Zoning in most Cascadian cities is anti-climate. Single-family zoning—the most sprawling residential zoning type—plasters swaths of the region’s urban areas. Seattle is prime offender: over half of its land is covered by single-family zoning. Bellevue, Bellingham, Eugene, Portland, Salem, and Spokane...Read more » -
The Forgotten Green Housing Option: Accessory Dwelling Units
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are a tool in the fight against climate change. Garden suites, mother-in-law apartments, and backyard cottages—the compact size of these unassuming homes makes them remarkably energy efficient, cutting lifetime CO2 emissions by as much as 40 percent as compared with medium sized single-family homes. Yet many of Cascadia’s cities maintain policies that pose major barriers to ADU construction, keeping this green housing option scarce. In Seattle,...Read more » -
Seattle’s New Environmental Study on Accessory Dwellings Obliterates Obstructionists’ Claims
UPDATE: Here’s Sightline’s comment letter on the ADU EIS describing our recommended options for the final policy proposal. In the summer of 2016, anti-housing activists from a wealthy Seattle neighborhood appealed proposed liberalization of rules governing accessory dwellings—commonly known as mother-in-law apartments and backyard cottages. Six months later a city hearing examiner upheld the appeal, forcing Seattle planners to spend the next year and a half slogging through a voluminous...Read more » -
The Narrowing of a Neighborhood: Wallingford
This article is a sequel to my previous publication about Seattle’s zoning history. In my previous article I provided a guided tour through Seattle’s last 120 years of city planning decisions, culminating in its current housing shortage. It’s a story of a myriad of seemingly tiny, innocuous choices—downzones, height restrictions, larger setback requirements, and escalating parking regulations—that together have strangled housing choice in the city, and inflamed prices to unprecedented...Read more »