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From Highways to Homes: The Opportunity to Reconnect Communities Divided by Freeways

This article is part of the series YIMBYtown 2022 The conversation shared below was part of the YIMBYtown 2022 conference, cohosted by Sightline Institute and Portland: Neighbors Welcome.* At its peak, federal highway construction demolished 37,000 homes a year to make way for roads. More than 1 million Americans—a significant …

April 12, 2022

New Fund Will Help More Seattle Residents Build Rain Gardens

Seattle’s RainWise rain garden program is spreading green stormwater solutions across the city, but the rebate program has been out of reach for some homeowners with more modest incomes. While RainWise offers generous reimbursements—$4,600 on average for the installation of rain gardens and cisterns—the homeowner has to pay for the work upfront, then wait up to two months for the program to pay them back. It’s an expense that not everyone can shoulder. A new financial program called the Green Infrastructure Rebate Advance Fund (GIRAF) should remove that hurdle by bridging the payment gap. A separate access fund will also provide small grants to partially pay for projects near the Duwamish River that cost more than the city’s rebate.

June 2, 2015

Bertha on Track to Resume Tunneling

After being sidelined for nearly 16 months from her hobby of building infrastructure projects underneath major cities, area grandmother Bertha Slocum is said to be on track to resume her latest endeavor: building a massive highway tunnel along the Seattle waterfront. “After I retired, I had a lot of extra time to devote to my crafts projects,” said Bertha. “I realized that tunneling under Seattle was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I figured, hey, I’m not getting any younger. So I went for it!” Bertha won the tunneling contract in 2012, beating out major international construction firms on the promise of delivering the project on time and on budget. But in late 2013 she was forced to put her hobby on pause in favor of training for a national seniors’ shuffleboard-bridge-knitting triathlon.

April 1, 2015

Smarter Street Talk

Policy solutions often come with their own vocabulary—acronyms, insider shorthand, and jargon. It can be alienating or confusing. Worse, policy-speak can risk obscuring the most important messages: why solutions matter and the people who should care. The folks at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, a local coalition of safe street community groups, have seen this first hand. At countless public meetings and in hundreds of community conversations, they’ve seen how the wrong message can confuse, put off, or even backfire, pitting otherwise friendly stakeholders against one another. They set out to find a better way. They listened, they observed, they used trial and error. And with years of road testing, they’ve learned what words and messages work to bring people together, build support for smart solutions, and create more civil and productive public discourse around how we design our streets. The new rules of the road they’ve developed help break bad habits and more successfully engage people’s interest, values, and emotions. Here’s what they learned:

March 31, 2015

More Tolls for Tacoma Narrows

The Kitsap Sun is reporting that a $1 per car toll increase on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge west of Tacoma, Washington is “close to a done deal.”

On July 1, rates will rise to $5 for Good To Go! electronic payment, $6 at the toll booths and $7 for pay-by-mail. A déjà vu will occur one year later.

WSDOT believes that if tolls on the bridge don’t rise, there’s a good chance that the state won’t have enough tolling revenue to cover the financing costs for the $728 million second span, which was opened to the public in 2007. Tolling shortfalls, in turn, could force WSDOT to dip into general transportation funds for a project that was supposed to pay for itself.

March 20, 2015

Photo Essay: A Family’s Vancouver Bicycle Cruise

When my husband Jason and I planned a trip to Vancouver, BC, we decided to bring our family’s bikes just in case. With our eight-year-old son Orion in tow, I wasn’t sure we’d have the chance to ride unless we sought out an off-street trail. To my surprise, we were able to ride—and not just on trails we had to drive or take a bus to, but through the heart of downtown Vancouver on a mixture of greenways and separated cycle lanes. The last time we were able to ride in such an urban environment was when we lived in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then, Orion was nearly 2 years old. We bought a bike with a child seat in the rear and made our way through Copenhagen’s neighborhoods on a daily basis. The city’s network of traffic-calmed neighborhood roads, cycle tracks on main streets, and an off-street greenway network made bicycling with a small child comfortable and easy.

March 16, 2015

The Comedy and Tragedy of the Port Mann Bridge

The comedians in the Port Mann Bridge forecasting department are at it again: despite a 29 percent decline in traffic volumes on the Port Mann bridge between 2005 and 2014, the province is still predicting an immediate, sustained increase in traffic across the span: That’s right—despite years and years of being wrong about the direction of future travel trends, they think they’ve finally spotted signs of a turnaround. You see, traffic volumes in December 2014 and January 2015 were a wee bit higher than they were in December 2013 and January 2014. And apparently that was enough for them to declare that..