> having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice.
We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. This would be amazing, the area around I-94 is, as you'd expect, quite unpleasant to be in. It's noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The interstate is infamous for being one of those roads that was planned to run through and destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s[1], and removing it would go some way to regaining what had been room for people to live. I think it's a bit of a longshot, but dang, I would love to see the cities recover that space for the people who actually live here, not just those who are driving through it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm really hoping we don't blow it by just rebuilding the stupid thing.
Please, please (please) contact everyone you can think of to support the idea. MnDOT has contact info on the Rethinking I-94 page[1], tell your city council rep, your county commissioner, your mayor, your state legislators, the governor. Tell your friends and neighbors. It's so easy to just fall back and do the same thing we've always done; making a change is really hard and we need to show that there is support for it.
I find it interesting to see the words "twin cities" referred to here as if we all know what that is. I can see that this is referring to Minneapolis as per the link, but without that we would be left to guess.
This article[1] shows multiple cities that have done that, many in the USA. It seems that in every single case, it was always a very good thing for the city.
> There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street.
I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire freeway through downtown).
How does a freeway through a city improve traffic in a city vs building a freeway around a city (no need to bother with the expense of tunnelling under).
Cars on a freeway are either headed to your city as a destination, in which case the speed at which you deliver them into the city doesn’t make much difference, they’re always going to cause traffic when they leave the freeway. Or the cars are headed through the city, in which I would assume most of them would be just as happy to go around the city as go through it.
So if you get to pick between through and around, why would any sane city choose to put the freeway through your city? You’re just bringing noise and pollution into your city, putting a huge great impassable scar through your city, and forcing the people who live to drive everywhere because the freeway slice up the city into segments that you move between in a car.
The highway under Boston has turned out to be one of the better solutions that the area could've had, I think. It doesn't mean that the highway that goes around (I-95) is unused, or even underused, but I-93/the former Central Artery going underground has allowed some really important revitalization of parts of the city while also giving pretty direct and (outside of the worst part of rush hour) quick access to most of Boston and Cambridge by car.
As forward-looking as much of the area is, we weren't getting away with "less car", and I don't think most places will today either.
I was thinking about this too. I've never lived in Boston, but have visited often enough over the past 20-25 years. While the Big Dig was an awful, wasteful, corrupt project, the results -- IMO -- make it all worth it. Moving all those highways underground made quite a few areas much more livable than before.
You can't build a freeway around Seattle unless you plan to make it float. Well, there is 405, but that is way around (and is its own chokepoint on the east side). Vancouver has much of the same problem with hills and water making it act as a choke point. I'm not sure how the Twin Cities compares.
There’s the trans Canada highway that skirts around Vancouver. It’s the fastest route by far whether you are going into the city or through it.
The I5 meanwhile turns into the 99 on the Canadian side of the border, and goes right through the city. It’s a nightmare since it is officially a highway, but in reality just a surface street in the city.
Creating I-5 was really contentious at the time. It destroyed neighborhoods. My family has lived in the area for several generations and my parents can attest to this.
Lidding it would be great, but removing it would be better. There are loads of people who live in the suburbs north and south of Seattle and expect to be able to drive 20-30 miles each way day-in-day-out to commute. If the city continues to grow, this simply isn't tenable in the long run, because you can't grow highway capacity forever; they would no longer be able to do this, which would be good. Just rip the band-aid off.
The only thing worse than having I5 is not having I5. There really isn't enough north-south corridors to replace it (15th, 99, east/west lake...really that's it), given that I5 is close to the water and a huge hill as it comes in across from UW. It is already non-viable to expect a 20-30 minute commute into the city.
We saw what happened when the Palestine supporters blocked off I5 a few weeks ago...on a weekend without a rush hour, people were stuck in traffic for hours.
I used to commute from westchester county into midtown, and there were definitely parkways in, although I never needed to go all the way down to Manhattan itself. I would usually try to take the train though (often not possible given how westchester county is poorly connected to train stations).
Because 405 is already a a crowded route that becomes bogged down during rush hour(s). Your choices are pretty much sound, city, lake, city, or mountains if you are looking for a route through Seattle.
It's actually a bit interesting to see WSDOT's plan for i-5.
For capacity they aren't expanding I-5 directly, but expanding i-405 and sr167 instead for people trying to go past Seattle.
For i-5 within Seattle area, there are some 2030s plans to convert the hov lanes to toll lanes and reconfiguring the reversible express lane system.
* I-5 Managed Lanes: SR 16 to Pierce/ King County Line
* I-5 Managed Lanes: Pierce/ King County Line to I-405
* I-5 Managed Lanes: I-405 to US 2
I don't see that working out. I405 is often worse than I5, it is just as bottlenecked as I5 is, and there isn't much room to expand it especially when it runs right up next to the water.
I feel sorry for anyone who has to actually do that commute. It was horrible when I was living in Bothell and attending UW 30 years ago.
The bellevue to lynnwood section was already 'expanded' a decade ago though as one can tell, it still has traffic. They're opting to increase the tolls now.
I think Boeing threatened to pull out of Seattle if WSDOT did not improve freeways, some years ago -getting stuff in and out of Everett is really important to them. If I-5 was torn down and only left with surface streets, what's left of Boeing would pull out and go to Kansas or some place.
You are located in the north of the city and need to get somewhere south of the city, or vice versa.
You only have a few roads to do that east or west of Lake Washington. In most cases, people aren't going to downtown Seattle, downtown Seattle is just in the way.
Maybe it doesn't make sense to have duplicated services for the city. I grew up in Tucson. There's a zoo, but it wouldn't really make sense to have 2 zoos. Likewise with the Sonoran Desert Museum. There are also unique locations to visit. There's 1 Titan Missile Museum. There's 1 Old Tucson Studios. There's 1 Biosphere 2. They are spread out on opposite ends of the city. There are a bunch of hiking spots that are all different, and people don't want to go to the same one over and over.
Then you have things like the air force base or the university. They're important for the economy so you may work at or near them, but for the most part you don't really want to live directly adjacent to them. Fighter jets are very, very loud all day long (my mom lived where you could see the runway right behind her house when I was a teenager), and the military is known to dump very nasty chemicals for their training exercises. University students throw parties, and there's more crime in the area. For a few years, I lived a little over 2 miles from the university, and I had my bike stolen out of my backyard. In the further out part of town where I grew up, that was completely unheard of. Some of the downtown parks are mostly full of homeless adults. The parks where I grew up were mostly full of kids/teenagers.
So there's reasons why you might want to live within a ~30 minute drive of a denser area with services or work, but without having to actually live near a dense area. And your day-to-day services are already spread across most of the city, so you don't need to travel for those. I get the impression that many cities have a similar dynamic.
Go look at a map of Tucson. Look at where the Titan II missile museum is, then look where Biosphere 2 is. Now tell me how much it would cost to build public transit between those two locations, and how many people would take it.
Trailheads are fundamentally incompatible with transit. They might be philosophical opposites. A trailhead accessible by rail is a trailhead I don't want to be at.
Not everywhere in the world is exactly the same. Stop trying to force a top-down solution that works in Europe on a geographically massive city like Tucson
Totally wrong. Transit != rail. There are amazing trailheads that are easily accessible from downtown Seoul by a reasonably short busride (e.g. Bukhansan national park). The fact that buses run to these trailheads does absolutely nothing to diminish them. In fact, they enhance them, because they make it possible to through-hike! Eat your heart out, personal automobile.
Generally cars are going to be faster (it's point-to-point with no stops to let people on/off), or equivalently, they have greater range for the same time. If your goal is to physically remove yourself from downtown, they let you go a bit further. Also you don't have to deal with someone leaving their mac-and-cheese meal to stink up the bus. Getting away from such unpleasantries is kind of the point.
Once you take in to account traffic, transit can definitely be faster than cars. A subway that bypasses traffic entirely, or even a bus using HOV lanes, can easily outpace a car, especially if it's an express bus (fewer stops) and services are centrally located.
I've worked at places where it could take 20 minutes to get out of the parking garage when a bus stop was less than a 5 minute walk, on-boarding/off-boarding was super fast (a pre-pay kiosk meant people didn't stop to pay when they got on), and I could be all the way home in less than 20 minutes.
Seattle is a narrow city bordered by water on the west and the east, so a lot of its expansion has happened along the north/south axis.
If I want to buy furniture, I need to go either to the far north or far south of the city to a suburb just outside the city limits (cheaper land).
Culturally, lots of food can only be found in certain areas of the city, which means north/south traveling.
In regards to services overall, obscene land prices means that not much new is being built that isn't owned by large corporations, so we are pretty much stuck with what we have, and what we have is rather quickly disappearing.
I think it has to do with the way the city grew out north and south, with the city itself as a chokepoint (since it is surrounded by water otherwise). Common reasons people need to go from north seattle to south seattle: IKEA, Southcenter, Seatac. I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).
There is some really great African food up north just outside the city. :-D Likewise along the northern parts of Aurora you can get some really great Korean food. (Also not strictly in the city limits).
Parks, lots of parks.
The only decent real "spas" I've found are all up north (Again, Shoreline, just outside of the city)
Federal Way has good Korean food also (well, along with lots of Koreans). Frankly, you'll find Asian communities south, east and north, with the high end in the east, the middle end in the north, and lots of value in the south.
Schools are better in the north, which is why we chose Ballard rather than Beacon Hill. The reason I don't think about North Seattle so much is because I live here, I guess (and getting places isn't so hard if I'm not crossing Seattle).
It sounds like you are already set up for I-5 getting obliterated.
If you only go to the south end for Ikea, Southcenter, and Seatac, how often do you really need to do those things? It's not like it becomes impossible to drive there, it just takes a little longer. Frankly, traffic in Seattle just isn't that bad compared to other major cities. I just checked the traffic from Ballard to Ikea, and it's 45 minutes on 99... I-5 isn't even the ideal route right now.
Of course I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, but you also have to weigh this against just how much additional real estate would come available if I-5 was gone. I don't think people's need for driving convenience actually stacks up that strongly against all the other positive considerations.
Whenever I-5 is blocked off, 99 will be a mess, so its not like I can just say "oh, not my problem because I can avoid using it." You have to think about the traffic between Vancouver BC and Portland Oregon, it has to go somewhere, and 405 is even worse than I5 most of the time.
> I think it has to do with the way the city grew out north and south, with the city itself as a chokepoint (since it is surrounded by water otherwise). Common reasons people need to go from north seattle to south seattle: IKEA, Southcenter, Seatac.
> I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).
@sean
To reach UW, northgate (well it's demolished just ice skating for now lol), ballard and fremont; granted this is a bit optional, uvillage is nice to visit as well.
Also I find it a bit interesting you have a harder time thinking of interesting stuff in north seattle, I am actually sometimes annoyed having to drive north past downtown seattle to reach north seattle. I didn't really think about it but yeah ikea/southcenter are relatively easy for me to reach. :)
@uoaei
Anyways regarding planning itself. Seattle is actually actively planning their next community plan, one of the items called out is whether to allow more 'urban villages' which have shops and other amenities.
For malls, Northgate should have been the north seattle mall but it's currently being redeveloped. There's U village but it's a bit high end. The other alternative of Alderwood mall isn't too bad to get to by driving but during peak traffic can be quite slow.
I live in Ballard, so maybe I just got used to everything up here. We don't usually need to drive unless we go somewhere far away (if anything downtown, just take the D line).
Light Rail to Lynnwood will be open by September of this year, which gets you to within 2 miles of Alderwood Mall. Light Rail to Alderwood? 2040, suckers.
Traffic will suck in a city that isn't designed to discourage people from driving. It doesn't matter if there is an elevated highway running through it or not; traffic is going to suck.
Invest in transit and make it easier for people to get around without cars; that's the only way to solve traffic. Building more roads (and widening existing roads) just induces more demand.
You completely leave out that the trans-Canada highway has a six lane bridge, and a train bridge less than 5 miles east of the downtown peninsula, and there was a conscious decision to not route the freeway through the peninsula.
Any freeway through Vancouver would have to cut through all of east Vancouver and then the downtown core then Stanley park, and they would have to completely rebuild the lionsgate bridge since it is only three lanes total, and then tear out a huge portion of the residential neighborhood on the other side of the bridge.
Why in the world would Vancouver, which is on a much narrower strip of land want to do what Seattle did and divide their city in half so people can get to Whistler 15 minutes faster.
I love that Vancouver doesn't have a freeway through the city - but they've also got a relatively good transit system. IIRC it's the equivalent of 26 lanes for cars.
I live in Vancouver, and absolutely love how we didn’t go with the freeway idea. And traffic will suck anyways, might as well let the locals enjoy the walks and life instead.
If you search for Stroads, you inevitably bring up Vancouver. You've just swapped one evil for another. I can't imagine walking along a stroad being very nice.
Oh, I totally agree about the stroads, I wish we could somehow make them disappear, alas impossible. They’re doing an ok job densifying some parts of them, so it’s less dead at least.
Ah, Sydney, Australia, has the same issue :D specially Parramatta Rd which goes from the CBD to the Western Suburbs[1]... because there were many "influential" people living in that area, they never managed to get a permit to make a freeway there... I didn't know there was a name for that.
Honestly, having lived in Vancouver as well as many cities that _do_ have highways running right through town, I didn't miss that in Vancouver at all. Traffic will suck both ways, and at least Vancouver avoids having ugly, loud highways along its waterfront and through most of its downtown.
Definitely, the best case for cars is to have fast highways that bypass the city, but there isn't a lot of room with that given Vancouver's geography, so it's a lesser-of-two-evils. Beyond cars, public transit and cycling provide a better solution in my opinion anyway.
Regardless... the biggest traffic pain point in downtown Vancouver is the 3-lane (total) Lions Gate bridge.
One of the reason I passed on a townhome in Wallingford with a really good view was because of the tire noise on the ship canal bridge. I’m not sure the other bridge is any better though. A tunnel under it all would be ideal.
Whenever I visit Vancouver, I find the traffic horrible compared to Seattle. It’s like…no I don’t want to drive here (to be fair, I don’t want to drive downtown Seattle either, but there is so much more going on in downtown Vancouver that it’s hard to avoid).
Gotcha covered here in the twin cities -- we already have north and south bypasses in I-494 and I-694. Now we have an opportunity to get I-94 out of the middle of the metro.
Tokyo's traffic is pretty reasonable, actually. It's quite surprising. I rarely encounter a traffic light where all the cars don't make it through, unless there's construction.
This is probably because train transport capacity is prodigious, and driving is expensive.
That's exactly it. Almost no one actually drives anywhere: most of the cars are taxis, and most of the rest of the vehicles are commercial (e.g. cargo trucks). When most of the people outside are taking a train, walking, or riding a bicycle, there aren't too many cars on the roads and consequently there isn't much traffic. The busiest places I see are near logistics centers, with lots of truck traffic coming and going.
Also, driving isn't expensive in Tokyo at all, it's actually free except on the toll highways. What's expensive is parking: with few places to park, and it being expensive to rent a parking space in your apartment, it's not that affordable or practical to drive. People also aren't allowed to own cars unless they have a place to park them, so we don't have the problem of car owners fighting over scarce street parking like many other cities.
I was just driving around in Seattle and couldn't help but notice everywhere I went was just a few miles away but it took 20-30 minutes because there was no highway in between. I have to wonder if that reduces or increases emissions. I suspect it's the latter since you have more cars running longer and stop/starting more often.
Bad traffic is a good catalyst for spurring local commercial development, assuming zoning and other bureaucratic measures don't hamper the situation entirely.
We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. This would be amazing, the area around I-94 is, as you'd expect, quite unpleasant to be in. It's noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The interstate is infamous for being one of those roads that was planned to run through and destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s[1], and removing it would go some way to regaining what had been room for people to live. I think it's a bit of a longshot, but dang, I would love to see the cities recover that space for the people who actually live here, not just those who are driving through it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm really hoping we don't blow it by just rebuilding the stupid thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_94_in_Minnesota#His...