King Street What?

So King Street Station looks really nice. Good for it.

All works, artistic or otherwise, say something about their creators. Train stations like this were monuments to the wealth and power of long-dead rail barons and their once-proud companies, statements (perhaps aspirational) of cities' positions among their peers. When they're restored this projects cities' commitment to preservation and restoration of their histories and become monuments to that. Preserving a city's history. Put that way, almost anyone will support it, and so urbanists and NIMBYs alike marched hand-in-hand to protest Madison Square Garden.

Train stations like this are just not that interesting to me because they tell the same story in every city. If people still traveled by rail they could go coast to coast walking through the same opulently overdecorated halls in every major city. They're as banal as airports and freeways in that way. Airports and freeways give the awful impression that nobody cares about this place... or if someone does, maybe you wish they didn't (LOL? Actually Denver is a pretty rad place to change planes as these things go). American train stations in the year 2013 give the impression that nobody cares whether or not they work. They just need to preserve something about the city's history... its history, its history, its history, its history...

But at least someone cares about the inside space of the place. In a country where we aggressively don't care (you may not want to listen to Kunstler rant bitterly for 20 minutes, but stay on through the intro muzak and listen to the first bitter, ranty sentence) about our public spaces. So... I guess when we have a space like this, even if it's in a sense generic, we should make it a place people can pass through as much as possible. Yeah. I wasn't quite sure where I was going to go with this post, but I think I'll go there. It should at least be a place people can use to exit the Sounder if it's on their way (or if they feel like detouring) like Chicago's Union Station, or can cut through during lousy weather like the Merch Mart.

Best-kept cycling secrets of Seattle

The first one is temporary, so ride it while you can. The Mercer project is going to make everything better for cyclists trying to get around SLU/Cascade/LQA/Seattle Center/Uptown/insert other names here. But until then getting across Aurora is still a pain, right? Actually there's a great route under Aurora until the cruel gods of construction take away the glorious bounty they've given us: two open lanes of Broad cutting right under Mercer and Aurora.

I don't know of any overhead images or maps that illustrate the current situation correctly; Google Earth images are out of date and SDOT's construction maps show the whole Broad Street underpass taken up by westbound car traffic. But on the ground right now the northern half of the underpass is blocked off entirely from car traffic. From the northwest corner of 9th and Mercer, ride west down the curving northern sidewalk until you're past the barrier, then hop off the curb into the empty street for a traffic-free ride straight to Taylor and Harrison. From there it's two blocks to Seattle's famous Bike Squid (I know that's what you came to town for)... and several decent bike routes to Belltown and downtown.

The second one is a permanent bridge over the Interbay rail yard that people just don't know about. Someone recently commented on Seattle Bike Blog that he'd been asked for directions from the Elliott Bay Trail to the Interbay Whole Foods and was stumped for a route across the tracks; you can't really get to the Magnolia Bridge, the Dravus Street Bridge is out of the way and not much fun to ride, the Amgen Bridge is out of the way to the south and requires hauling your bike up and down stairs.

But there's another bridge, just south of the Magnolia Bridge, that gets you over the tracks and, optionally, Elliott Ave/15th Ave. It seems the road it carries is called Galer Street (Galer has to be the most disjointed street designation in Seattle), but what's distinctive about it is that it's shaped like a big S, so I call it the S-Curve Bridge. I imagine it gets lots of traffic certain times of day (it looks like the main motor vehicle access to Amgen and Piers 90 and 91) but much of the time it's almost eerily empty. On the eastbound side of the road there's a shoulder you can use as a bike lane if there's traffic trying to pass you; the westbound side has both a shoulder and a protected sidewalk leading to/from a winding ramp down to the west side of Elliott. If there was lots of bike and pedestrian traffic on the bridge the sidewalk and ramp would get pretty crowded... but then again, it probably wouldn't be any worse than the Fremont Bridge, which the City of Seattle seems to think is showcase bike infrastructure.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

Via the great Human Transit, here's a map of where people “miss connections” in every state.

• There's a Walmart belt, and it's right where you might think it would be.
• Arizonans miss their connections at LA Fitness while Californians prefer 24-Hour Fitness. I feel like LA is one of those places whose name signifies something totally different to people that live there and people that don't. What other places are like that? Vegas? Nevada does miss connections in casinos, though I wonder how many of those were visitors. I think I've mostly lived in places where locals and outsiders have similar ideas of the place.
• Rhode Islanders miss connections in parking lots and Coloradans in gas stations. I guess I can understand how that might happen. But Georgians miss connections in cars? Someone call Frank Lloyd Wright, somehow the social context has transcended the windshield.
• Wisconsin and North Dakota miss connections in bars (so does Vermont). But in between them, born-to-be-mild Minnesota misses connections in supermarkets.
• I like some states' unique entries. South Carolina, at the football game. Natch. Oklahoma, at the state fair!?! I had to look this up — does Oklahoma have an unusually long state fair, or do Oklahomans only fall for mysterious strangers one week out of the year? It looks like their state fair park is in OKC and hosts events all year, so most of the missed connections are probably at other events.
• Indiana has both the most boring and inexplicable entry: at home. Come on, Indiana!
• As Nathan Vass says, in Seattle (and apparently Portland) the full 99% ride the bus.

Anyway,

I hope that when my children's generation looks at me and says, "God, what a troglodytic asshole that condemned all my friends to this hell," I have the wisdom and balls and self-knowledge to just say, "Sorry."

Social justice is not a system!

Over dinner with some co-workers tonight the concept of carbon taxes and social justice came up. One person objected to the idea because it could have a negative impact on social justice. I think it's possible to design a carbon pricing scheme that at least isn't income-regressive, I've put some thought into this, and so I went into the specifics of it a little. But I think I neglected a bigger point about the nature and relationship between these things. Social justice isn't something that can be achieved once and for all by system or policy; it must be constantly worked toward under any economic system or policy framework.

There's a parallel here with economic freedom. The idea of granting people economic freedom and the ability to accumulate capital opens up great potentials for inequality. This is hardly a point where we have to speculate into the future or look into the past, we see it right here and now. But it's also, in the big picture of the economic success of our society, a big winner. There are plenty of things economic freedom alone does not accomplish, and we need to work in other ways as a society to accomplish those things. Social justice is one, but there are plenty of others. Economic freedom didn't get us to the moon, and it didn't defeat Hitler. It didn't even create the Internet. But it did help us build the society that pooled together its resources to get to the moon, defeat Hitler, and build the Internet (and then it took the Internet and ran with it).

Our global society's protection of its environment and wise stewardship of Earth's resources will contribute greatly to its success or failure over its next few hundred years. If we do or if we don't succeed we'll have to work continuously for social justice. If we do we may have the great privilege of working for social justice in a world that continues to sustain us, where peace and prosperity is possible. If we don't we'll be working for social justice in a world of famine, shortage, and war. Of course when the rubber meets the road we should create specific policy that furthers the end of social justice. But when it comes to doing what's in the long-term overall interest of our society, we can't just declare that incompatible with social justice and do nothing.

A different heart metaphor

Today at my church Reverend Grace said a few of those things that just make me roll my eyes. The suggestion that we listen to the figurative “heart”, representing intuition and emotion and generally thoughts we can't explain, is fine. The comment that the heart has a larger magnetic field than the brain has utterly nothing to do with it — it's one of those new-agey statements that uses linguistic coincidence to take an interesting scientific fact and make of it an idea that's both more questionable (that intuition is more powerful than reason) and less interesting.

Maybe a more interesting figurative use of the heart is that of the constant worker. Why would the heart actually have a larger magnetic field than the brain? Because it's a powerful muscle whose action is precisely timed. The heart's unconscious working is, of course, necessary for every other part of the body and mind, but the body and mind must in turn provide the heart with prudent maintenance, so there's a bit about interdependence.

And where does that leave questions of intuition, emotion, and reason? With a different metaphor. Maybe the gut. I hear a lot of blood goes there.

This is what happens, Larry, when you ask a cyclist for directions...

Today I was riding home through Wallingford when a driver asked me for directions to Lake City. I thought about it for a second, then told him to keep going north up to 45th Street, turn right, then make a left on 11th Ave NE... wait, scratch that, you can't turn left on 11th. Ah, just keep going down 45th, it turns into Sand Point Way, curves north, and goes all the way to Lake City.

Somehow I completely forgot the existence of I-5.