Owen

Found a solution for Mercer Island's extremely difficult conundrum.

Did a double take because I thought this was an onion article.

Pepperidge farms remembers there were housing folks who repeated "maybe he'll be good in housing cause he's a developer" nonsense.

It's bananas that citizens of our *capitol* don't have real representation. Not to mention the logistical disaster from the federal government meddling in city operations.

I agree that people have a completely unrealistic perception of vehicle travel times.

It's actually a complete failure of empathy to assume folks calling for consequences don't have the ability to understand why people behave poorly.

I think Columbia Way/Alaska likely has the highest traffic volumes but crossing there also has probably the lowest time savings. Its probably less than 5 minutes to drive up to Mt Baker and then back down.

I kind of thought there'd be a tax backlash from Schultz announcement -- despite it not saying anything about taxes -- and then I read SeattleWA and the whole sub wants his head for selling the Sonics. lol

It should also be unnecessary to note that conflating Biden and Harris is both completely inaccurate and purposeful.

What real power did Harris have exactly?

Can we just clarify that there is a distinction between a country arming its allies and the actual tactical decisions in a war.

People can still believe the former is bad, even very bad, without pretending they're the same.

Basically everyone driving from the north or south would not lose any time at all. That's probably >99% of all trips in the corridor.

But if you wanted to give drivers a cut through, you could do something like the Lander overpass at Graham or Orcas for probably around $200 million.

I think it would take a driver <10 minutes to drive from the middle of the section, around one side and back to the middle. Which is the worst possible trip scenario and essentially non-existent.

You would need to do pedestrian crossings and those could be added at a trivial cost.

Im advocating that a project like this should eliminate those turns. The big, regional value from this that would politically justify eliminating a street is grade separating link. The Greenway/Park is absolutely wonderful but I think would be much harder to justify the trade-offs alone.

My proposal for making MLK Way safer is that the street on the west side of the tracks (green) should be turned into a linear park from Mount Baker Station to Rainier Beach Station. Turn the east side of the tracks into a two-way street.

Using Lander St as a comp, you could do all the E-W arterials for less than a billion.

Correct me if I'm wrong but none of these options close the West side of MLK to vehicle traffic?

That's the big value gain because it makes the Link grade separated.

You could also do one or two over/under-passes and it would be a relatively smallish amount of money to get grade separation.

I earnestly think we should do this.

I want someone to actually do a study of the travel time impacts because I suspect it would be close to zero.

Also, thanking your bus driver when you deboard.

Wut?!?!

It's Senators actually cared about gas prices they'd impeach the mad king.

Probably the thing people hate about The Urbanist the most is the ads. They’re terrible, but they pay our bills. Now you can pay our bills instead and turn them off!

When I biked home super late a couple nights ago, the trail took me through a wetland. It's in the middle of the city and underneath a highway. But because it was 1am and there was very little traffic, I could hear hundreds of frogs croaking.

Right but we're talking about a couple hundred votes.

And let's not let Bill off the hook. Easy to see the 2000 election going differently with an incumbent president who has personal integrity.

No. The problem is the freight does not actually give Amtrak it's legally required ROW.

We already saw this story play out in Europe. Prices went up, some stuff was replaced by LNG but the whole energy infrastructure just accelerated towards renewables.

"Bro, if you didn't want your house burn down you probably should spend more time using the hose instead of yelling at me for tossing on gasoline."

In 2024, Nebraska voters rejected private school vouchers by nearly 60%. Voters in 45 of 49 legislative districts said NO.

So did Jim Pillen and Pete Ricketts accept the will of the voters? Of course not.

I'm not talking about name recognition.