Through their various services, Sound Transit and Metro together carry about 500,000 riders a day; that’s almost as much as I-5, I-405, and the viaduct combined. Or to visualize it another way, the average capacity of a single freeway lane is about 18,000 vehicles a day—making ST/Metro’s half-million rides a day roughly equivalent to building a 28-lane freeway through downtown Seattle.

Seattle’s long been described in contradictory terms. The weather: Is it mild or dreary or mildly dreary? The politics: Progressive yet torpid. Progressing toward torpor? The attitude: Tolerant — of all like-minded people.

But the dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant. Have a nice day. Somewhere else.

Street food, density, signage, and unconventional retail spaces

Seattle is #1!

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

An extremely polite group of anonymous guerrilla road safety activists armed with $350 worth of reflective plastic pylons turned the painted Cherry Street bike lane under I-5 into a protected bike lane Monday morning.

All those jobs in liberal, high-tax Seattle get Republicans to thinking about the meaning of their economic policies. Not.