blog.macalicious:Seattle

Auto-Less in Seattle

02 May, 2006
Posted at 23.00 PDT

Seattle, as I’ve said more than once, has a few things going for it that appeal to me to no end. Once of those things is its electric trolley bus system. What makes it so interesting to me is, IIRC, the fact that being in the Pacific Northwest, and thus having access to the ample hydro-power around the region, allows the city to run its electric bus system—and its entire power grid—free of oil. Now this certainly doesn’t include the entire bus system, as it wouldn’t be efficient to try and string electric lines everywhere the buses need to go. Still, it’s kind of cool.

Almost since they were introduced, cars have been a symbol of freedom and independence in the U.S. To be an adult meant buying a car; it was part and parcel of the American dream: a secure job, a house with a two-car garage in the suburbs, and 1.8 children. You can thank Henry Ford in large part for that. His application of assembly line techniques (already in use, but don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the myth around the man), brought the price of cars down low enough for the average middle-class American to purchase. As a society, we’ve never looked back.

In the thirties, Germany’s Adolf HItler looked at what we here in the U.S. were doing with our road system, and the result was the country’s much vaunted autobahn. (Yes, copied from us, not the other way around, surprisingly). We had a lot more ground to cover with shiny new highways than they did, and after Germany began feeling frisky in 1939, we had to postpone major work for a few years while the Soviets and the West showed them just how useful a highway system could be for invading armies.

At any rate, after we finally finished fighting the last of the nineteenth century wars for lebensraum, and the advent of the atomic bomb had put paid to any major power’s desire to conquer neighboring countries, the U.S. finished up its national highway system—and did so with a vengeance.

Death of the city trolley systems at the hands of the auto manufacturers
peak-oil production—us
irony of freedom and independence reputation
sold car.

To me it’s especially cool considering that yesterday, for the first time since I was eighteen, I have taken the plunge, and am now living car-free. It feels a little strange.

per centage under road?

Seattle | Permanent Link

blog.macalicious:Seattle

Biking

11 Apr, 2006
Posted at 21.15 PDT

Last year my friend Ben began biking to work, which inspired me to haul my own trusty Peugeot out and begin doing so as well. The first day nearly killed me, but I stuck with it, and was pleasantly surprised (as I always am when I start exercising in some fashion), at just how damn fast it got easier.

Now I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, which tops out at over 400 feet above sea level, and is only a mile from Puget Sound, so you can imagine how steep it actually is. Luckily I only live about 300 feet up the hill, so I didn’t have quite as far to go as I might have. As you might expect, when I started biking to and from work, I ended up pushing the bike up the steepest stretches (and Seattle has some insanely steep hills). But it was most surprising to find myself biking up the Hill without once getting off the bike in less than two weeks, the improvement was that fast. Over the course of the summer I found myself putting more than 600 miles on the bike. I was extremely proud of this.

Fast forward six months. Hardcore cyclists bike throughout Seattle’s long chilly winter.

I am not one of those people. I hate cold ears.

Spring is now in the air though, and the mornings are finally getting warm enough that a light beanie under the helmet keeps the ears nicely warm, so last week I started biking in to work again. I did not have high hopes about my fitness. True, I took up snowboarding this winter (at the age of 36! Go me!), but that activity wasn’t exactly regular, so though I wasn’t completely sedentary through the winter, I might as well have been.

Day one: I bike in to work, and call it quits at the last long hill. Biking home, I do the same thing coming up Capitol Hill when I hit the nasty steep stretch on Belmont Ave—two blocks of sheer vertical hell. This does not suprise me in the least.

Day two: I bike the whole way, both to and from work.

This does surprise me. My response, as I near the top of the hill is a loud “Holy shit!” For some reason this startles the pedestrian on the sidewalk. Part of my surprise was at thinking “I can do this,” as I approached the hill. The other part was being right.

It puzzled me at first that last year it took me nearly two weeks to get fit enough to take that hill, but this year I was up to it in only two days, mainly because you always hear how quickly the human body loses its fitness when sedentary. But then I realized why this was a bit different—or at least I think this may be the reason—and that was that biking strengthens the legs just as much as it strengthens the cardiovascular system. And while I know without a doubt I’ve lost the cardiovascular fitness I’d gained from several months of summer biking, my legs have been getting used every day in my wanderings around Capitol Hill. I’m guessing that the simple act of walking around every day has slowed the loss of the muscle mass and strength gained by last year’s biking. And that’s pretty cool. Basically, I got a free pass over the winter. This year I get to start the biking season with a head start.

After only three trips to and from work, an eight mile round-trip, I am already seeing the improvements. Now I just have to finally ditch the car.

Seattle | Permanent Link

blog.macalicious:Seattle

Sustainable Seattle

10 Apr, 2006
Posted at 23.16 PDT

There have been rumblings in the news lately about the Seattle city government’s desire to finalize a new growth plan for the city core, pushing ideas of mixed-use neighborhoods with higher population densities. I hadn’t paid it too much attention myself.

Well, tonight I had the good-fortune to be dragged to see Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, speak on sustainable cities and their planning. I’d forgotten about the talk until late this afternoon, but despite feeling a bit rushed initially, ended up enjoying it immensely. M. Lerner is a big proponent of mixed-use planning, something with which I whole-heartedly agree. If this vision is what we here in Seattle can begin to orchestrate for ourselves, I will be very excited indeed to continue living here.

Curitiba has what appears to be a rather well-deserved reputation as a near paragon of urban planning. Just reading about it makes me want to learn Portuguese and move. (And I was pleasantly surprised to just now learn it is a sister city of my old hometown, Orlando, Fla., ironically a city with a near total lack of urban-planning and plague to all the subsequent ills such a failure of foresight causes).

It was, at any rate, extremely encouraging to see such a large turnout at Benaroya Hall for M Lerner’s talk. I only hope that it portends a new commitment by my beloved, adopted city to sustainable, high-density, mixed-use development. It seems the city is always comparing itself unfavorably with Portland or Vancouver, as if we’re under some obligation to mimic their planning process, or are on some sort of timetable. The truth of the matter is that though Seattle has made some bad choices, it has an awful lot going for it as well. It is relatively compact for such a large city, and with its vital core bound on both sides by water, I think we’ll find it easier to turn our focus back from the suburbs on the outlying areas inward to the city proper where it belongs. The suburbs can fend for themselves, as far as I’m concerned.

One thing I’ve developed since moving to Seattle is a profound distaste for suburbia. What I see when I end up traveling through the ‘burbs is a horrifying waste of what used to be prime real estate: farmland. There was a time—and it is fast approaching again—when cities were closely ringed by the farms that provided them food. Cheap oil will run out. This is not open to debate. Supplies are finite, the equation closed. And when it does, there will be a mad rush to reclaim that old land, for the cities will have to have it. But that’s the future. Ten years, twenty, it doesn’t matter right now. What does matter, what creeps me out to no end, is the sheer isolation that suburban life inflicts on people. I have many friends, and have known many people, that want nothing more than the classic two-car garage house in a subdivision.

Why?

How is such isolation even remotely desirable? And I ask that question as someone renowned among my friends for my own idiosyncratic near-hermit habits. I’m a classic introvert. Get me in a crowd of people and I feel as if I have to be “on”. For every hour I spend among people, I need an hour to decompress—by myself, thank-you-very-much. You’d think I was prime material for the American dream. But it is creepy as all hell to me to think of isolating myself in my car every day, fighting traffic out of the city, all to go to my own little isolation chamber in the ‘burbs. And to what end? To sit slack-jawed and drooling in front of the soothing blue glow of the idiot box each evening? No thank you. To me, that’s a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. (Have you never even noticed just how inwardly focused the modern house is? Thank the television and auto for that. Houses used to be beautiful from the front, with large porches welcoming you into them. Now most that front is given over to the garage. Must house our mighty chariots!)

Well, once again I’ve derailed myself, going off on yet another tangential rant. If you have any interest in city planning—and you should, you’re spending your life in one, you know—I recommend looking into Jaime Lerner, even if only to familiarize yourself with some interesting ideas about the future of the city. Seattle seems to be moving towards this idea of a sustainable city, and I do hope we as a city can keep the momentum up. One thing M. Lerner made clear in his talk was that small changes can have much larger impacts on a city than you can imagine. The trick appears to be figuring out where to apply the leverage, something somewhat self-evident to be sure, but it is nice to see some concrete examples of this principle demonstrated in the city of Curitiba. Lerner’s career as an architect seems to have had a positive impact on his tenures in government. I’ve now a little more hope that Seattle will head the same direction.

On a side note, one related to my earlier comment that I find Seattle a bit more willing to raise its middle finger to trends in the rest of the country, it was surprising to learn tonight that Seattle lead the way raising its finger to the Federal government by deciding to begin implementing the Kyoto protocols on global warming despite the current Republican administration’s patently hostile stance towards doing anything at all about the problem. And more importantly still, over 130 other cities have joined us.

Seattle fuckin’ rocks.

Seattle | Permanent Link

blog.macalicious:Seattle

A Quirky City

06 Apr, 2006
Posted at 21.38 PDT

It’s no secret among my friends that I love my adopted city. I moved up here from Florida in August of 2001, and haven’t regretted it in the least. The Pacific Northwest just agrees with me. There are things I miss, (and I’m sure my friends here could give you the list even better than I), above all else the daily afternoon thunderstorms throughout central Florida’s endless, stifling summer (which runs more or less from the end of March through the end of October. Don’t ever let anyone tell you seasons are tied to the solstices and equinoxes, for they patently are not. Spring equinox does not magically herald the beginning of Spring. Practically speaking, it signifies the equinox happens during Spring, not causes it).

For years my favorite daily ritual was to curl up in a cushy chair with a pot of coffee, the Florida room’s jalousie windows cracked open a bit, a copy of the New Yorker in hand, and sit back and read while the house shook and windows rattled from all the lightning strikes and subsequent booms of thunder—often striking within a mile. (I especially miss the ones where the flash of light and boom of thunder were nearly indistinguishable. Talk about getting your heart thumping!) Central Florida is the lightning capital of the world, and I miss those storms more than anything else. I remember the sharp tang of ozone in the air, and that wonderful anticipation as the distant thunder would roll in closer and closer as the anvil clouds slid across the landscape. The afternoon heat could make you feel as if you were smothering in a humid, unbreathable blanket of air, and then the first breezes would reach you, preceding the thunderstorm, and the temperature would drop twenty degrees in the space of minutes, like someone threw a switch on the outdoor’s air conditioning.

But Seattle has its charms too. For one, I have yet to see a roach here in nearly five years. People here swear they exist, but they’ve never experienced the bowel-loosening terror of hearing a Palmetto bug droning around your bedroom at two o’clock in the morning like some antediluvian insect bomber searching for a mammalian target. Yech. And the damn things fly at you when you spray them. Just what you need in the middle of the night, an insect with a kamikaze complex. If anything can make one question the existence of God, it’s a giant two inch long cockroach attacking you in the middle of the night when you try to put it out of your misery. Just what was She thinking when She dreamed up that one?

None of those here, thank goodness.

Actually, the whole point of this little entry—before I ran off on all those tangents—was supposed to be an odd thing I’ve thought about often since moving here, namely Seattle’s quirky loyalty to electric trolley buses. Electric buses used to be popular in the U.S. but are now largely confined to Europe, and a few cities here on the West coast. It’s not likely Seattle will get rid of them anytime soon as they are far more efficient at climbing the city’s insanely steep hills than conventional buses.

When I first moved here what stood out most sharply for me were the overhead electric wires running over the roads everywhere in the city. And with over 140 electric trolley buses and more than 60 miles of electrified routes, you do see them everywhere here. I wasn’t too sure what to make of them at first. Many people consider them unsightly, but their appearance has really grown on me over time. In an odd way, it makes being on the streets of the city feel more intimate. They’re only wires, but you can’t help but be aware of them in the visual background, and they end up lending an air of a roof to streets, a visual demarcation between the man-made and the limitless sky.

Seattle’s a city with a ceiling, in a manner of speaking.

The nearly silent buses that run along them also add to the city’s charm and feeling of being different from other cities in the country. You’ll often find yourself catching a glimpse of bright blue light from the corner of your eye as a bus crosses a connection on the overhead wires and spits out an arc, or hearing the twang of tension singing through the wires as the buses pass by. They seem old-fashioned, but also symbolize to me Seattle’s tendency to raise its middle finger to trends in the rest of the country. Everyone else may have succumbed to the strong-arm tactics of the major auto manufacturers, but Seattle has headed off on a bit of a transportational tangent. They’re generally slow to hop onto the bandwagon here, and that is to the residents’ credit.

At any rate, longtime residents may not notice them, but as an outsider, I certainly do. Friends complain occasionally about Seattle’s public transportation, but compared to what I remember of Orlando’s, this place is heaven. In point of fact, I’d never even been on public transportation in the U.S. until I moved here. Orlando’s was that bad.

There are enough oddities to this city to fill a double dozen future posts. Maybe I’ll get around to noting them someday.

Seattle/Quirks | Permanent Link

blog.macalicious:Seattle

Seattle

11 Jun, 2004
Posted at 19.51 PDT

You know, one of the things I’ve found hardest to adjust to in Seattle is the summer. What I’m used to is a total of two seasons: Summer, and Not-Summer. Florida just doesn’t get much else. And in the deep South, summer runs from March to October. Your typical Florida summer day is 90°+ temperatures and 95% humidity. That’s a far cry from Seattle.

What throws me off so much are the days of 60 odd degrees, plus the need for a jacket in the evenings. Damn strange to these Southern eyes. Still, it’s nice, just a little difficult to get used to, even though it’s been nearly three years. The side benefits are worth it, I think. It’s like living in an air-conditioned world. I think my jaw dropped when I realized almost no one had air-conditioning here, nor did they need it. Wow.

Seattle | Permanent Link