Open Thread 20
West Seattle Link (WSLE) has an online open house now, and an in-person one October 25th.
Sounder South (S Line) has a survey on potentially shifting its focus to more off-peak service. This would cancel plans to make trains longer peak hours, and reduce peak frequency from 20 to 30 minutes. Respond by October 29th, or visit one of the popup tables.
The Seattle Transportation Plan draft is taking comments until October 23rd. The Seattle Comprehensive Plan (One Seattle Plan") is ongoing.
King County estimates it will need 309,000 new homes over the next 20 years ($), a third of those for people making 30% or less of median income. Seattle will need 112,000; Bellevue 35,000; Federal Way 11,000; Shoreline 13,000; Kenmore 23,000.
Several West Coast cities wring hands ($) over homelessness. They're asking the Supreme Court to allow them to close encampments even when there's not enough housing to move them into. The cities appear to be acknowledging that the well-meaning effort to house all the homeless, for years now a widely espoused goal, isn't actually possible." That it would cost too much to provide housing for everyone. Missing from this is that if you sweep homeless off the streets, it doesn't make them go away, it just move them to other streets. The only way to get them out of public spaces and church lots is to give them housing, put them in jail, shoot them all, or give them a basic income high enough to afford market-rate housing. Putting them in jail would require building 6,000 jail units, and maintenance costs of tens of thousands per person per year. Meanwhile countries poorer than the US, like Japan, manage to house practically everybody.
Seattle needs more public restrooms. ($)
Busier transit, better transit (RMTransit video)
Evaluating Portland's multimodal transit network and bike infrastructure (CityNerd video) The bike infrastructure is stagnating.
Adding coffee grounds to concrete ($) strengthens it and lowers carbon emissions.
The high cost of owning a car. ($)
The final part of the East Lake Sammamish Trail in Issaquah opened October 7th. This provides a continuous series of trails from Golden Gardens in Seattle to the Issaquah Community Center, where several mountain trails start.
This is an open thread.