Midweek Roundup: heat wave

2025 Seattle Elections:

Candidates for Mayor and city council debated housing and transportation issues last week:

• Seattle Mayoral Hopefuls Sound Off on Transportation, Housing (The Urbanist)
• Candidates for Seattle's 2025 Citywide Council positions 8 and 9 outline their transportation priorities (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Seattle's 2025 District 2 council candidates on biking and safe streets (Seattle Bike Blog)

What transit questions would you ask this year's candidates for Seattle City Council, Mayor, and King County Executive?

Local Transit News:

• A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump admin from imposing new conditions on federal funding for homelessness and transit (The Seattle Times, $)
• The Downtown Redmond Link extension apparently couldn't handle this heat wave (The Urbanist). Additional coverage by The Seattle Times ($)
• Congress might have just gutted WA's phase-out of new gas-car sales, expected to go into effect in 2035, by revoking California's ability to enforce more stringent pollution regulations than the national Clean Air Act (The Seattle Times, $)
• Metro is moving closer toward implementing sturdier safety partitions fleet-wide (Metro Matters)
• Sound Transit is preparing for another agency-wide project realignment (The Platform)

Other Transportation:

• SF Bay Area Bench Collective installs first eight guerrilla transit benches at bus stops in the Mission (Streetsblog SF)
• Trump's 2026 budget will, apparently, leave federal transit funding unscathed, increasing funding for some projects while cutting funding for EV chargers (Smart Cities Dive)
• With CTA facing a massive fiscal cliff, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to tax the ultra-rich" to keep the buses and L running (Chicago Sun-Times)

Land Use & Housing:

• Bremerton is the latest city in Washington to ditch parking mandates (The Urbanist)
• Taller buildings, smaller elevators, more efficient stair configurations could boost multifamily housing construction everywhere (The Urbanist)
• 2025 is on track to see record number of evictions in Washington as pandemic-era protections expire (Cascade PBS)
• Portland appears to be filling in its missing middle with housing that's much more affordable than Seattle's (Real Change)

Commentary & Miscellaneous:

• The elephant in Hearing Room A is Oregon DOT's inability to cut costs on the IBR (City Observatory)
• Uber's new shuttles look suspiciously like a bus, but worse (Grist)
• Bus-only lanes can irritate drivers, but they help city dwellers share limited space (Jarrett Walker in The Globe and Mail)
• Strategies to reduce carbon emissions should largely ignore concerns about carbon produced for new construction (Pedestrian Observations)
• Eastlake Avenue in the 1930s (Seattle Now & Then)
• New Housing Doesn't Have to Create New Traffic (Henry Grabar; Slate)

This is an Open Thread.