The Seattle Weekly reports on the newly light-railified Rainier Valley. The best part?
the really big news for the previously scruffy thoroughfare is sidewalks. They might as well be paved with gold, they're so valuable, and rare, in many neighborhoods around here.oddly, much of Seattle has never had sidewalks
Forty percent of Seattle streets lack full sidewalks on both sides of the road -- totaling 650 milesShouldn't basic infrastructure, like sidewalks, be taken care of before installing multi-billion frills like light rail?
The No on Prop. 1 campaign will be showing this commercial on TV:
And yes, the cost really is $157 billion, give or take
http://www.janehague.com/issues/transportation.html
Posted by: Richard Pope on September 28, 2007 04:38 PMSIDEWALKS !! ??
The Mayor plans to pay for them with LIDS. No skin off his back. My stretch of street will cost ME more than $20,000. It will disturb my peace for a month, jam a rockery in my face and convert my street into a single lane.
Your house obviously was purchased by you AFTER sidewalks were already in place.
My part of the Thornton Creek drainage includes a tributary shown on the 1894 USGS topo sheet. Salmon baby. I'll fight sidewalks here with every trick in the Sierra Club book.
If your point was that we need priorities and sidewalks was just an unfortunate example, then you are excused.
Posted by: Bart Cannon on September 28, 2007 05:35 PMI think the second one belongs elsewhere (sorry Richard) and the third one relevant to the time before the election, but sidewalks have more to do with stormwater (I'd be more than happy to explain elsewhere) than infrastructure funded under Prop 1.
I drove by that new ST station by the airport today, and could not help but think, how many people are going to drive to that station to park, and then take the tiny trip to the airport from there, just to get away from those massive parking fee's at the Airport. DUH >>>>>>>>
This alone will plug up that parking lot to the degree that there won't be a single spot available for any commuters into Seattle, it will cost the Port of Seattle Billions. It will be the new Airport parking lot.
There will not be a spot available for anyone heading to Seattle!
I gotta watch this one!
Sims, glad to see you got your head out of your....on this one!
Posted by: GS on September 28, 2007 10:09 PMFor debt taken on in the next few years, it is probably reasonable to use as a proxy the current range of interest rates. However, what will interest rates be in 20 years? This is where things get really iffy. We could assume the present situation will continue: we keep buying from overseas, then the people we buy from turn around and buy T Bills or Mortgage Backed securities.
I don't think that will happen, for two reasons. First, a lot of the debt is held by countries like Japan and China, that over the next 20 years are going to go through some major demographic transitions. They will not want to keep holding bonds, they will need to spend the money on pensions.
Second, the US has some storm clouds ahead. The US has a $13 trillion underfunded social security liability. This does not include medicare, or the accumulated US debt. Also there's a lot of local debt as well. I want to commend Crosscut today for posting this link:
http://bojack.org/2007/09/portland_a_city_deep_in_hock_1.html
It details how in Portland, a household of 4 is on the hook for $34,000 of Portland city / Portland area debt. No one has ever done a similar study for the Seattle area that I've heard of. Maybe it is time to do so.
Given how congress has acted so far, a very likely scenario is a major increase in debt to pay off the social security shortfall. However, this could well drive up interest rates. Or maybe it drives up tax rates, reducing the returns to capital and labor.
If one or both of these scenarios do end up having an impact on interest rates, we could well be in a situation where the interest ends up being far higher than the "conservative" projections used in the ST2 model. This means more funding goes to repay bond holders, and less is available for operations, or for construction itself.
The details just aren't there. People could make conceptual arguments of "the funding will come from redirecting the expenditures for bus that's replaced by the rail." Oh, so what's the comparative cost recovery of running shuttles around neighborhoods as opposed to running a large bus down an arterial? Does the ST farebox recovery financial model assume any sort of sharing with Metro or whoever runs the shuttles?
Posted by: Stuart Jenner on September 28, 2007 11:28 PMSame thing that I noticed. The neighborhood that I grew up in (P.V.E., for any 'Southlanders' out there), originally platted in the '20s -- although built-out, later, at least had curbs on the streets where a pedestrian could be out of traffic. What's ironic is that the streets built by the builder of my circa 1915 house in Tacoma included curbs and sidewalks (I have a copy of a newspaper article written a couple of years later about the homes that he built), and homes down the street, built in the 1940s and '50s don't even have a decently paved street -- let alone curbs and sidewalks. I've seen the same pattern up in the D.P.R. of Seattle.
@10 Assuming that you're not being sarcastic, you can -- in part -- thank the Americans with Disabilities Act for goading public agencies around here into installing sidewalks to avoid lawsuits for failures to provide 'reasonable' accommodation on a public service (a road) to individuals with disabilities.
Posted by: FT on September 29, 2007 07:56 AMI decided to walk the way from the last stop of the 150 to the Center. While I was walking around, I noticed some signs for condomiums at street level -- one said, "$150,000 -- $400,000".
Gee -- I thought, that's quite a range...but at least there's some for $150,000. Then it struck me, there just aren't that many tall residential buildings in downtown Seattle.
With all the whining and moaning about the high cost of housing, it's not as if there's not shortage of places to build. I mean, New York is jam packed with buildings...but Seattle seems to have a very very few apartment buildings and the rest are all these crummy one story commercial buildings with restaurants in them that were built in the pioneer days.
You'd think with such high prices, there would be high demand, and hence lots more building.
But there ain't.
You figure it out. (I have my guesses...will save for a later post.)
Posted by: John Bailo on September 29, 2007 10:36 PM