Viva La Cola!

Founded in January 2009, PubliCola is a blog about Seattle written by journalists who are dedicated to non-partisan, original daily reporting that prioritizes a balanced approach to news. Started by longtime local editor and award-winning reporter Josh Feit, PubliCola is the first online-only news site in state history to get media credentials to cover the state capitol.

PubliCola was off and running. In June 2009, PubliCola hired another award-winning journalist, super-sourced Seattle city hall reporter Erica C. Barnett.

People were afraid that blogging would change journalism. Instead, we believe journalism can change blogging. Twenty-first century journalism may look and feel different, and yes Erica isn't afraid to get cranky, but we're committed to making sure online news still delivers independent, reliable, even-keeled coverage. And most of all, we're committed to making sure the coverage sparks honest civic debate.

Bringing you cola for the people, PubliCola is named after Publius Valerius PubliCola, the alias for the authors of the Federalist Papers—the original bloggers.

x close
The first online-only news site in state history to get media credentials to cover the state capitol and Seattle city hall, PubliCola has been called a “must-read” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a hot “New Media Mover and Shaker” by Seattle Magazine—which also cited our own Erica C. Barnett as the city's No. 1 news nerd.

Walking the Walk

Opinion   February 23, 2010 at 12:23 pm Guest Editorial

Today’s PubliCola Op-Ed from the Downtown Seattle Association is the latest installment as we begin regularly publishing opinion pieces by prominent local leaders. We debuted our guest Op-Ed series with a piece by Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna.]

By Helle Søhlt, Kate Joncas and Todd Vogel

One of the most effective things a city can do to be safer and more competitive is to become a magnet for people by investing in its public spaces. Cities around the world are learning that eyes on the street—people going about their everyday lives—are critical to creating an inviting pedestrian experience. A vibrant city,  a safe city, and a sustainable city all come from the same thing: We must make Seattle a great place to walk.

It’s a fortunate fix, because it creates great opportunity for downtown Seattle, which today stands at a crossroads of sorts when it comes to safety, competitiveness and quality public space. A recent Pew Research survey found that college grads prefer Seattle second only to Denver as the place they’d most like to live. Seattle has a vibrant downtown and is surrounded by breathtaking mountains and water, yet we can’t rely forever on the Mount Rainier effect and natural beauty alone.

The number of people walking on our downtown streets is lower than many other international cities of our size.

Also many of downtown’s sidewalks and other public spaces lack the necessary amenities and features that invite people to linger as opposed to just pass through. Downtown has long stretches of sidewalks void of any greenery and undefined connections between the waterfront and 1rst Avenue and other major pedestrian attractions.  Seattle needs to enhance its public spaces and integrate them better with private development in order to stay competitive and make downtown more inviting.

This goal, to improve Downtown’s public spaces, led to the most exhaustive Public Space and Public Life Study of any city in America.  Gehl Architects, the City of Seattle, the International Sustainability Institute and the University of Washington’s Green Futures Lab teamed up to better understand how Seattleites—and visitors to downtown—spend their time in the city.

The data will help Seattle better understand its own patterns so it can make walking, biking and hanging out in the city more attractive still.  Making a truly pedestrian-friendly city will take years and a serious long-term commitment. Gehl recommends that Seattle think of itself as “the blue-green city”—a blue city in the way it connects the entire downtown to the water, and a green city in the way that its green roofs, alley-ways and roads use sustainability practices.

What are the keys to successful public life?  Drawing lots of people who want to linger in the spaces because they are safe, comfortable and enjoyable. We need a few other things: A variety of places that tempt passers-by to stay in downtown for a while, a balance of road users that invites bikes and walkers as well as cars, and a strong walking network between attractive destinations. While these are long-term goals, the city can achieve some important things right away. It can create park boulevards and pocket parks by installing green elements on all the east-west streets, building off the Bell Street Park Boulevard project already underway. Bus stops, for example, are an opportunity to create a green oasis of seating. The city can encourage parking lots and garages to create active facades that offer food or services to passers-by. And the city can create green corridors to take advantage of under-used space by turning alleys into walkable, green pathways through the city.

Seattle  can lead the country by making this people-focused planning process the bedrock of how it conducts business.  Only by planning in a way that encourages people to live sustainably—by making it convenient and comfortable and fun—will the city persuade citizens to embrace these changes.  In a world environment struggling to stay healthy, those changes cannot come soon enough

We have an enormous opportunity to create a great walking city if we place a higher value on the quality and features of the public spaces that knit together downtown and create places people want to be. Putting people first in our city’s planning can make Seattle still more livable and more prosperous. Let’s keep our vision bold and expansive, but begin with small changes so we can all enjoy downtown more now, and never stop trying to create the sustainable, people-magnet city that we all want Seattle to be.

Helle Søholt is a Founding Partner of Gehl Architects in Copenhagen, Denmark. Kate Joncas is President of the Downtown Seattle Association and Todd Vogel is Executive Director of the International Sustainability Institute.

Helle Søholt will speak about the results of Gehl’s Public Space and Public Life Study on Tuesday February 23, 6pm, Seattle Art Museum. (Visitors need to enter on the Hammering Man side of the Museum.)



  • mel

    i agree
    seattle's current downtown is a relic from the mid century mindset. and yet the potential is enormous.

  • matthewsbeachmikek

    Agreed as well. Check this out. It's not in Europe:

    http://www.streetfilms.org/melbourne/

    I'm sure we can find lots of streets and alleys, not only downtown, but around the city, that would flourish if they were made more friendly to pedstrians and bikes.

  • pedestrian

    Areas outside of downtown Seattle have great expanses of green and no sidewalks. The Downtown Seattle Association and Kate Joncas in particular regularly lobby to prevent funding of sidewalks or of other pedestrian infrastructure in neighborhoods outside of downtown Seattle. I hope that Kate and DSA can make some progress in their views of what is Seattle and what is a walkable city and consider all of Seattle as warranting a great pedestrian environment.

  • http://yrihf.com/ jabailo

    Kent Station adjacent to the Interurban Trail is far more walkable than downtown Seattle. And we're building new bike interfaces along the fabulous Event Center.

  • fnarf

    Get stuffed, John Bailo. Downtown Kent is a joke, and it's less pedestrian-friendly than it was twenty years ago. Kent Station is a mall surrounded by giant parking lots.

    Matthewbeachmike is on the right track: Melbourne is arguably the greatest walking city in the world. And a big part of that is the “laneways', which are in many cases no bigger than our alleys, but instead of homeless people pissing they are full of thousands of happy people eating in restaurants and shopping.

    That's what's missing from this guest editorial: any conception of what REALLY makes cities interesting. It's not frigging “green space”! It's not “connections to the waterfront” either; there's not that much ON the waterfront of interest. What creates interest in Melbourne and elsewhere (including Copenhagen) is an extreme density of retail shops.

    Seattle is handicapped by having insanely wide streets, meaning that the opposite walls of the civic street “rooms” are way too far apart to communicate with each other; but even worse, they don't communicate with anything else. Around the corner, there's nothing. And Seattle lacks the dozens of arcades that run through Melbourne's blocks, which break up large blocks.

    But what it really boils down to is shop density. Seattle's downtown blocks typically have one or two or three shops or restaurants on them. If you want to visit another, you have to walk a relatively long distance. Pedestrianism is a synergistic feature: the more different attractions you pack in closer, the more different kinds of connections you create, and the tighter the web draws. It's exponential. It's also impossible in Seattle.

    Storefronts should be 100 feet wide max, and more like 20 feet wide for most of them. Our alleys should be converted to retail, like Post Alley is. Stop worrying about crap that doesn't matter, like benches and parks (parks kill downtowns). Look to Central Melbourne, seriously.

  • pl

    Some good ideas, but just because you build retail, doesn't mean it will necessarily come–retail needs people willing to spend money (read: employed people–need to focus on creating jobs), and retail needs visibility (if you don't see the retail, you don't know to shop there). Also, building retail 20 feet wide may not necessarily allow for viable business–building retail so that flexible widths are available is the best option. let the retailer figure out what works for him/her.

  • yeah…right

    DSA? Ha. Fox, meet chicken coop.

  • joshuadf

    Except at Pike Place/Post Alley, but you knew that.

  • doberg

    How do I get a copy of the study? “Gehl Architects, the City of Seattle, the International Sustainability Institute and the University of Washington’s Green Futures Lab teamed up to better understand how Seattleites—and visitors to downtown—spend their time in the city.”

  • sarah68

    “thousands of happy people eating in restaurants and shopping” in Melbourne instead of homeless people pissing in alleys, huh? According to an Australian report published in 2007, there were 4,252 homeless people in Melbourne. Assuming they haven't all found homes since then (a safe assumption), I wonder where they put them? Obviously somewhere that the happy people–and the tourists–don't see them.

    We don't know where to put our homeless people because there isn't enough shelter or housing–or public restrooms, so there is indeed pissing in alleys in Seattle. Perhaps, knowing so much about how Melbourne cleans up its city, fnarf, you can give us some advice. But bear in mind that we'd like to keep our homeless people alive, if possible, so we need places with roofs.

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/106207652321616246395 joey

    According to the flyer passed out last night, it will be available by “mid-march” on http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/centercity

  • Staying at home

    This is all great, but I'm disappointed not to see anything in this op/ed about public safety. You can build all the green boulevards and pedestrian alleys you want, but so long as the homeless, mentally unstable, drug/alcohol addled, gangbangers and street kids take precedence downtown, people will choose to spend their time other places. Having lived in Seattle for 15 years and traveled to cities around the world, I am astonished at how much leeway we give to anti-social behavior downtown at the expense of providing safe, inviting public spaces for the vast majority of Seattleites and visitors who are regular folk that want to go shopping, dining, or strolling. I've gotten to the point that I avoid downtown because of the horrid behavior that seems to be tolerated there – I've been spat at (three times at 3rd and Pine by the young men that congregate there), mugged, begged for change more times than I can count, and harassed to the point that I'm just not willing to go there any longer. I'm not some suburban Victorian prude – I love urban spaces and vacation in cities all over – but Seattle has for some reason decided that the dregs of society get to run the streets. Until there are strong curbs on this behavior (public intoxication, open drug dealing, gangsta intimidation, street kids taking over Westlake Square, aggressive panhandling), you can build as much “green” space as you want, and it won't make much difference. For years I worked in an international visitor's program in Seattle, hosting guests from around the world. The number one thing every single person commented on was fact that downtown is overrun by the homeless/drunk/drugged/etc. etc., and that they couldn't understand why we would let this problem fester. Fix this, and people might consider spending more time downtown.

  • vonb

    Last experience (car-less for ten years, live & work downtown), it was a hassle to walk downtown. It's one thing to walk at your own pace. It's another to require a pivot foot, move laterally, maybe even rotate to get open, then stutter step to a complete stop per block. I even resorted to gesturing cars along (with hand or nod, not finger) while they were being courteous to me but I wanted it to move along so I could walk without being the car's obstacle so I could go at my own pace, and etcetera, couldn't co-exist without hypertension, it seemed.

    “Long stretches of sidewalk” is not the same as a continuous walk under pedestrian control. The defensive mode of being out there was not the enjoyable healthful kind when a car's turn indicator told a pedestrian it was turning already and an anxious driver was about to honk or say something, or brake-pedaling cars nudged “walkers” to get away from the corner fast so hurry the fuck up. The predatory layout of the roads is a pre-existing colossus, known as leaded-gasoline automobile culture/”I'll let you out and drive continuously around this block while you shop, give up on finding a parking spot, so you'll see me driving around the block.” Or, “I'm going to keep screeching around in this car until a parking spot opens up.”

    So, close some intersections off as has been suggested, maybe, or run cars parallel to walkers for stretches LONGER than a block. I was never clear on why foot bridges were not a topic. I heard they are an impediment to commerce, i.e., delivery trucks too tall–but that sounds like a lame excuse. Maybe some streets shouldn't allow delivery trucks as some hopefully soon won't allow cars. This is nothing of course without interaction/retail/draws as the article states.

    So my point is mainly about commuting on foot, despite having some variety of different routes to take, was consistently a chore slash pain in the ass because of car domination (the alleys were the fastest and most efficient downtown pedestrian route: smelly but efficient, and a curiosity when you emerged and ran into someone you knew–they [1] look at you, [2] they peer down the alleyway or stare straight at the dumpster, and [3] they look at you again).

  • fnarf

    I share your concern for the homeless. Melbourne's homeless are not out of sight; but they live with them. Just like we do.

    Be aware also that “homeless” doesn't equal “street drunk”. Most homeless people (in both Melbourne and Seattle) are not staggering around wasted downtown; they're living out of their cars, trying to get their kids dressed for school.

    One thing Melbourne doesn't do is pack the center of their historic district with dozens of facilities for the homeless, at the expense of every other usage. They provide the services; they just don't provide them in ghettoes.

    Melbourne has a far livelier downtown area than Seattle, that's all. And their peripheral shopping streets blow ours away as well. Think Pike/Pine, or the Ave, or 45th in Wallingford, or central Columbia City — then multiply by ten, both in terms of density of shops and length — and in DIVERSITY of shops. Seattle is mostly devoted to the chain store and the box store, even downtown. A Jamba Juice here and there isn't a deal-breaker, but when there's nothing downtown EXCEPT national chains, cities suffer.

    Compared to a city like San Francisco, or even a city like Portland, our downtown is vacant and given over to cars, plazas, and blank walls. We should be finding ways to pack people in and give them exciting things to do. But we're not; we're thinking of ways to

  • fnarf

    Well, exactly. We could have MILES of Post Alley if the people making the decisions knew what cities looked like.

  • fnarf

    Another thing about narrow retail spaces is that they're more affordable, so attract people who are priced out of larger spaces but still provide valuable city services. Why aren't there more shoe-repair places downtown? Because there are too many gigantic spaces that only work for huge corporations with multiple outlets and the kind of planning staff that can make deals with malls, or downtowns like Seattle's.

    For some reason, the place that keeps popping into my mind is the Elephant and Castle, which is an abomination against all that is urban. That space is probably unrecoverable, due to the tragedy of building design that was perpetrated there, but if it is redevelopable, it's big enough to support a dozen small shops that would create traffic, instead of the the world's worst fake English pub not located in an airport.