Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took many hours to bring the little guys to the pinnacle of urban development, and then, since the game never ends, it took another many hours to tinker the place into slums and ruin, rezoning here, tearing out a transportation hub there, until finally you had to unleash natural disasters upon the land just to keep yourself interested.

The Department of Development and Environmental Services and Ron Sims are about to play some real life SimCity with King County. 2008 is a year that's allowed "substantive changes" under the 1994 State Growth Management Act, and there's a Public Review Draft of the coming zoning changes online for our perusal. DDES Director Stephanie Warren says:

The draft update has some new and innovative land use policies that will make King County a national leader in two areas. We want to start integrating public health more extensively with land use decisions and begin evaluating climate change impacts during environmental review of larger development projects.

A Seattle Times reporter says one of the goals of the new plan is to create walking districts within the county by increasing the amount of allowable traffic congestion in those areas. Hm. Sounds like something we'd dream up in SimCity. Hey, just because none of Seattlest's "new and innovative" land use policies really panned out in the game doesn't mean that taking public health and climate change impacts into consideration leads directly and inexorably to a Godzilla attack, though.

Proposed changes to the county's Comprehensive Plan would allow homes, stores and offices to be built in existing commercial centers outside cities — even if traffic already is bad enough to prevent development.

In White Center, the plan would allow far more intense development that could encourage creation of a pedestrian corridor.

A series of public meetings begins on Saturday, 1pm, in Redmond.