San Francisco is the reason nobody understands this. Much of the “left” there is fake and performative, actually made up of wealthy heirs who are more concerned with keeping their parents’ houses than normal left motivations.

Bob Kettle never rides transit and doesn’t think people who do matter.

These confirm: Saka, Kettle, & Rivera are car-addled car brains. Kettle wants to shrink buses to give cars more space. Rivera wants a study she can wave while shouting "BUSES ARE ALL EMPTY." Saka wants to micromanage Metro service planning because, obviously, he knows better than the pros.

What's less clear is why the mayor was convinced to renege on the deal struck by all sides over several months of negotiations. As the "taller, denser, faster" mayor, Wilson is deciding to make it more expensive to build housing at time when development is drying up.

Affordable housing does not win from this terrible decision. The only winners are rich NIMBYs.

Kettle is perfectly happy to “assume major increases in transit ridership” if it allows him to brag about Seattle meeting climate goals, but if they justify actual spending of money, they’re suddenly wildly implausible.

Bob Kettle drives everywhere, and he sees his constituency as only people who drive everywhere. Transit riders should remember that at the ballot box.

Both the “history” and the reasoning in the Thomas dissent, which obviously wants to be a road map for a future Court that overrules this decision, are full-blooded Claremont nonsense—random items desperately thrown against the wall without even spaghetti sauce to hold them together.

We finally have our trolleybuses back in Madrona! 🥰🥰 Once the line crew got around to it, restoring the wire near 12th and Union took just a few days. We need to be able to do small wire projects faster all over town.

When thinking about #VisionZero in Seattle there is an important 80-80 rule to remember: 80% of 🚶🏼‍♂️fatalities are on multiple lane arterials. 80% of 🚴🏾‍♀️ fatalities are on streets with no bike lane.

I wish more people would correctly describe these groups. Their purpose is to prevent infill, and redirect the growth it would absorb into more exurban car sprawl. Given that, their green rhetoric is an ironic joke.

Learned some interesting things researching this pod, like: the IEA expects cooling to drive electricity demand more & faster than data centers between now & 2030. And also: with current tech & a decarbonized electricity supply, we could reduce aircon's GHG emissions by 97% between now & 2050.

Exactly the dynamic in Seattle.

Property owners and businesses seem fine to give up on-street parking for this and Seattle seems fine to leave these in the right of way. What if we turned these blocks parallel to the road and made them into tactical protected bike lanes? Let's use this wasted space for something good.

No. Both wages and prices matter. In the end the goal of a society should be to allow everyone to live safely and with reasonable comfort. You can’t get there with exploitative wages, but you also can’t get there with out-of-control prices. Both have to be in balance.

We quite literally have a whites only refugee program and somehow the media won’t call the Administration white supremacists.

This is establishment of religion and a SecDef who was smarter than a below-average mold spore would understand that.

Feldstein believes that Rainier Beach should be taxed to pay for Hunts Point’s roads. That’s a choice, my dude.

This thread makes me more convinced than ever that we need to allow all forms of housing in all non-industrial areas of the city, no exceptions. I am just plain done with people digging in like mules and resisting any and all change even when they know that it is going to price their own kids out.

New research studying the intergenerational transmission of housing wealth in the US finds that (a) it's more persistent across generations than the earnings gap, (b) it widens White-Black disparities and (c) it's exacerbated by local supply inelasticity www.nber.org/papers/w35256

We are alarmed that several supportive small businesses had their names added to a petition against the Ave For All Pilot without their knowledge, consent, or regard for their actual feelings on the project. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Not the worst day to go tangle with cars…

Dominant culture in the US just assumes that The Way You Get Places is by getting in a car, period. People who live that way simply cannot process the fact that others walk, bike, or use transit, and literally nothing can make them believe it. We see this pattern over and over again.

I'm from Seattle. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a boring, simplistic 4-chord song that any high school rocker could have written.

these people seriously want to replace the actual forests outside Seattle with roads and car-dependent suburban sprawl, all to prevent other people from living more densely (and using fewer resources per person) here in the "city"

Since Alex Fryer doesn't explain who "attorney Toby Thaler" is, I will: he's an advocate who has fought upzones, worked for Alex Pedersen, and has been open about the fact that he doesn't think Seattle needs to grow at all.

introduce yourself with 10 bands you've seen live (most transcendent first) Cleveland Orchestra Wiener Philharmoniker NY Philharmonic Chicago Symphony Metropolitan Opera Orchestra London Philharmonic Philadelphia Orchestra Boston Symphony Orchestre de la Suisse Romande National Symphony Orchestra

I suspect that the current STM requirement for 65% of THD stops to be in Seattle is what is behind Metro’s insistence on deadheading late EB trips. If true, really short sighted when it’s obvious that THD overall is so beneficial for Seattle residents.

I shared some ideas for making Trailhead Direct even better.

There are real people who really think “keep places shitty so some houses in the middle of shittiness will be affordable” is a better policy choice than “build more houses so there are enough for everyone.” Baffling!

Bus Trolleybus Tram Subway Commuter rail Paratransit

Tommy Tuberville is dangerously short of neurons to be setting policy and we need to have a conversation about how to ensure only people with the capacity to serve as legislators are eligible for office.

Yarrow Point, WA. Incorporated because its wildly wealthy residents didn’t want to pay a tiny property tax to be part of the local library system.

What they think: “Downzoning will drive out all the new arrivals who I don’t think are cool.” Reality: Downzoning will drive out anyone, regardless of coolness, who isn’t rich.

ICYMI over the weekend, the Seattle Times Editorial Board put out an article last Friday that was essentially a rallying cry for NIMBYs to continue to slow and weaken the Seattle Comprehensive Plan. As part of this article, they decided to include this tidbit. 1/5

ST was structured from day one to have incentives to maximize land coverage, not ridership. This is the inevitable result of its structure. We need a Seattle-specific funding stream with a Seattle governance structure. Integrating that into ST will be a severe challenge but this is the bed we made.

Local bus nerd says: these 8000s are looking a bit too shopworn for Fancy Katie. Time for a shiny repaint in black.

I’m on the whole neutral to positive on Waymo but this is utter bullshit.

The best time for this was 30 years ago, but the second best time is now. This will radically improve transit in Everett and improve it for all SnoCo residents.

I just feel like Vision Zero should mean something to @seattledot.bsky.social. Even when it's inconvenient.

We know the revolution has started when we divide ourselves into tiny cliques, none of which will talk to one another. nominally based on hair-splitting ideological differences but actually based on who we think is cool.

Boy, what a terrible headline. We *need* the wealthy to participate in public services. If only poor people ride the bus, then rich people won't wield their power in support of public transit or, worse, will wield their power *against* it.

I’m never going to object to a challenge from the left. But I can’t support this one, because I think this incumbent deserves to stay. Sen Pedersen is moderate, but he is also incredibly knowledgeable & cares about making state law that works well in practice. And he is a genuinely good human being.

Governor, congresspeople, everyone in power—the region’s jewel city yearns for rail transit. We gotta be able to knock this out ASAP. Like at the expediency at which we can reopen a highway closed by a landslide. It is a political capital printing machine.

People love trains! The absolute best thing local and state politicians could do for their careers is to cut the red tape, find whatever funding sources are necessary, and open more of them as soon as humanly possible.

When I moved to Seattle in 2006, there was no regional rail connection to anywhere. In two days, we open a connection that unites TWO LINES together into a full network. Progress is possible.

Every single time. Every single time. Scratch an anti-housing “leftist,” find the same wealthy incumbent homeowner that all the other NIMBYs are.

When Jim Inhofe (the dumbest Senator until Tommy Tuberville showed up) left this mortal coil, the very last thing I expected was that his seat would go to someone who was EVEN MORE of a meathead.

Cities spend millions on plastic flex posts that get flattened in a week. Meanwhile, the cheapest, most effective design tool is a boulder. They protect people, enforce behavior, and actually survive doing their job.

I want to see just one media article, just one, describing Doug Wilson or Lance Wallnau as a “radical cleric.”