> Grew up in the PNW but thankfully moved away 25 years ago before most of the growth.
Seattle has always been a boom (and bust town). I grew up their 20 years ago, and my dad lived in Seattle after his tour ended in Vietnam. The same things we complain about today, we were complaining about them in the 90s and dad was complaining about them in the late 60s.
The boom city nature of Seattle means that it goes through periods of lots of growth quickly enough.
> people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
Building more freeways usually just attracts more demand. We will never build enough roads to satisfy single driver occupancy demand. The only way to win this is by moving people around more efficiently. If Transit can’t work in Seattle, the city is simply doomed and it’s growth will implode (another bust…it’s not like we haven’t had a few of those before).
IIRC the boom started around the grunge era(30 years ago) when people in east and central cities started to realize Seattle sucked less than their frozen wastelands. I don't think it has slowed down since. All cities have booms and busts, but that doesn't mean you plan for the busts.
You fix the added demand with zoning and a comprehensive regional growth strategy. Not building freeways to service the demand you've have for decades is just insane.
I don't think there has been a single new freeway added since I can remember(early 80s). There is still a huge reliance on surface streets and 2 lane roads to get to the bedroom communities on the outskirts. Not adding lanes to, say, hwy 18, hasn't done a damn thing to limit growth in the east side. It has turned the region into a giant clusterfuck around rush hour though.
Again, Seattle has been a boom town ever since it was founded. The grunge era was actually kind of a bust (if you remember, unemployment was a bit high and housing prices were stagnant in the early 90s), but the start of maybe what we can consider the current boom?
Seattle is a boom town, it doesn’t just have a conventional boom or bust cycle. All west coast big cities (Vancouver BC, Portland, SF, LA, San Diego) have a similar rapid growth profile with similar problems. Note that none of these cities have been able to solve them adequately, and we ran out of space to build new freeways decades ago, so that solution is never happening, even if anyone thought it would solve the problem at all in the first place.
A city like SLC, which has room to add freeways along with republican run government to add them, hasn’t been able to fix its traffic problems either. In fact, they just get worse as the new freeways encourage more sprawl.
Seattle has always been a boom (and bust town). I grew up their 20 years ago, and my dad lived in Seattle after his tour ended in Vietnam. The same things we complain about today, we were complaining about them in the 90s and dad was complaining about them in the late 60s.
The boom city nature of Seattle means that it goes through periods of lots of growth quickly enough.
> people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
Building more freeways usually just attracts more demand. We will never build enough roads to satisfy single driver occupancy demand. The only way to win this is by moving people around more efficiently. If Transit can’t work in Seattle, the city is simply doomed and it’s growth will implode (another bust…it’s not like we haven’t had a few of those before).