Seattle’s pro-transit mess
I’m still trying to get a handle on the mess of disjointed reasoning that stands in for transportation policy in Seattle, so Knute Berger’s paean to some unused offramps for an expressway that never got built is actually really instructive. It’s also kind of nuts.
My first reaction to the piece, which describes the “Ramps to Nowhere” as a symbolic reminder of a time when Seattlites came together and blocked a massive ring road, was that it’s kind of telling when you measure your city’s history of urbanism by the infrastructure projects you’ve blocked instead of the ones you’ve built. My second was that if you’re looking for monuments to Seattle’s urbanist heyday, you really don’t need to go all the way up to 520; there’s a much better one cutting straight through downtown. And you can even ride on it!