Results tagged “pedestrian”

• West Seattle Blog explores the case of the missing swing-set. Thankfully, no one's figured out how to steal a public park swing-set (yet); rather, Lowman Beach's swings are being replaced by a new and improved set.
• Ooh--even better than a monorail: Ballard may get a water taxi.
• Remember how we mentioned that Cleveland High School students faced a daily death trap just getting to school? The Rainier Valley Post wasn't exaggerating about that.

Seattle pedestrians and bikers are fed up with it too. Over 70 Seattle sidewalks are closed due to private construction. A recently completed audit on sidewalk closures and pedestrian access concluded that the city wasn't doing enough to help pedestrians navigate the ever-changing sidewalk closures. In hopes of changing that, the audit proposes that construction projects be coordinated to avoid conflicting closures and that the city begin enforcing rules about pedestrian violations of sidewalk closures. Since the rising cost of gas makes walking more of a necessity for some of us than a leisure activity, we hope the sidewalk situation gets sorted out soon.

If recently released rankings of big cities in America are to believed, yes. Seattle is the #1 Big City in the U.S. for Pedestrian Safety. And to that we say--remind us never to walk anywhere else in America, ever again.

While there is plenty of good beer in Seattle to keep us busy, it is always nice to head out of town to visit some of the brewpubs spread around the Pacific Northwest. We try and do a trip as often as we can, which usually turns out to be one trip every three months or so.

Franklin vs. Garfield is one of the Seattle sports events that you just shouldn't miss. Here's what we wrote about it for The Stranger in September:

True local hoops fans don't miss this game between two perennial inner-city basketball powerhouses, even at the cost of connubial tranquility. The 2005 game at Garfield fell on Valentine's Day, but happily married Husky basketball coach Lorenzo Romar was there anyway. A win in this game means neighborhood bragging rights for the rest of your life.

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.

On Friday while walking to work downtown, we saw a motorcycle cop at an intersection on southbound 3rd Ave waiting to turn. He had to wait for the northbound bus to pass, which was running a yellow light. He waited and the bus was still rolling by when the light turned red. The cop was in a hurry since he was turning on a red light, which is probably illegal (who knows?), and so he didn't have time to notice the pedestrian who had started crossing the street during the last seconds when the light was still yellow, as she was obscured by the bus. He almost ran over her, but he swerved and braked and just barely avoided the collision. He looked pissed. Then he started yelling something and turned on his red and blue cop lights. We're pretty sure he ticketed her for jaywalking but we didn't stick around to find out.

"You're lucky to have Bumbershoot," remarked comedian Michael Ian Black the other night. "There are a lot of music festivals, but this is an arts and music festival. You get both." He paused. "You get both." Everybody laughed. Why? That is one thing we did not learn at Bumbershoot.

According to the guy who holds the "smile" sign at the entrance to the pedestrian walkway to the ferries, this truck started rolling backwards down the hill until the driver swerved into the brick stairway next to the Federal Building. Scary; because there are a lot of pedestrians around there and also because it's a big truck crashing into a place that's guarded 24/7 by cops who use those mirror thingys to look under every car that comes in. Funny, because for the past few weeks they've been doing work on these bricks. Seriously, there have been workmen basically taking a toothbrush to every individual brick in that wall, and they're not even finished before a truck blows down the whole thing.

Some signs went up at the future site of the Colman Center earlier this week. Where there is currently a parking lot surrounded by Western Ave, the alleyway entrance to the Owl and Thistle, the pedestrian walkway to the ferry terminal and an on ramp to the Viaduct there will soon (2009) stand a 12-story office tower that's making the case that there is a market for "green" office space in Seattle. What's particularly environmentally friendly about an office building, apart from the whole consolidation of resources thing? According to the building's website: LEED certification, a green roof, reclaimed water irrigation, low-flow showers and toilets and a community bicycle fleet, among a few other more boring features. While some of those sound cool (particularly the bikes, although we imagine they will never get used) if you really want to do green building right--and in Seattle we really should--you should go all the way. How about using reclaimed water for those low-flow showers as well as irrigating the green roof? How about a carbon-neutral building? How about solar power?

There was a lot of talk on the blogs last week about newly-released census data that highlighted the 23% of Washington residents that get to work by means other than riding in a car alone. Seattle is in the top ten US cities in walking to work, taking the bus to work and biking to work (although not in carpooling) all of which are impressive and encouraging. There is an element of spin to all that fantastic news, of course, and the fact remains that 77% of us still drive to work alone.

Apparently its that time of year again, since at least one Seattlest contributor witnessed a few crow attacks on civilians in the past week, including an attack on his own feeble, defenseless person by a pair of crows on the north side of Freeway Park earlier this week. They swooped down from behind at his head, squawking, and followed him halfway through the park. Upon exiting the south side on Seneca he observed a different pair of crows swooping down at other people.Then today he spotted yet another attack on an innocent pedestrian.

Our quest to make it from Renton to Ballard for happy hour was nearly dashed yesterday because some drunken idiot craving attention almost jumped off the Aurora Bridge.

PREQUEL TO MCARTNEY'S WINGS: Richie Unterberger, the author of several books on the history of rock, shows some film footage and plays some music recordings of unreleased Beatles material. He´s promoting his latest book, The Unreleased Beatles -- Music and Film. We had no idea they were in jail! (Ha! Because of the "unreleased" -- see how...oh...sure, we can move on.)

You're at an intersection staring down traffic, trying to get someone to stop so you can get across. Suburu Honda, Honda, Suburu, that new Mustang, Prius, then someone with those damn studs on their tires that scrape the asphalt so loudly you can hear the road repair coin getting sucked out of DOT's wallet: Krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkr. Of course this is the guy that stops. Mountain man, down at sea level to pick up a few tanks of propane and tear the roads of Seattle a new asshole with his little metal knobbies. The car that finally stops always has to pay for all the cars in front of him who didn't, but little metal knobbies guy gets an extra long pedestrian meander. When he takes off again: Krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkr.

On Saturday, they will rock you. In advance of their first show ever in a bonafide rock club, Seattlest asked Buttrock Suites co-founder, producer, choreographer, dancer, and lead head-banger Diana Cardiff how exactly they combine Poison and Bon Jovi with grand jetées and pointed toes. However they damn well please, it turns out.

After some letter-writing and phone calls to the mayor and city council members, vanishing Wallingford crossing flags have been resurrected. During their first appearance, our toddler found them magical. She had recently learned the power of the word “No,” so we anxiously latched onto and encouraged her enthusiam. We said hello and goodbye to the flags as we drove by. At bath time, we sang a song about the flags to the tune of “We All Live In a Yellow Submarine.”

--After one city council member's aide was killed by a car while crossing the street, and another's stepson was seriously hurt in a similar accident, you'd better believe the council's ready to take the most decisive action they can. That's right--city charter be damned--they're going to "approve a resolution creating a pedestrian master plan and a city-appointed advisory group to develop it." Ugh.

This was not a very happy week for the -ist network as one of our own,

On the sixth of October we were walking down 40th Ave N in Wallingford from the bus to our house. We remember the evening clearly because... Because the way our camera stores photographs on our laptop tells us that we took this picture on the 6th.

Those new signs sure don't seem to be doing the trick.

Following the advice of one of Seattlest’s faithful readers (and proving we value the comments!), we continued the craze of eating on the Eastside, where we think the best Chinese restaurants are located (our favorite is Szechuan Chef, followed by Yea’s Wok). This time our destination was Café Ori, a Hong Kong-style eatery with a side order of Taiwan-style drinks.

Halloween is Tuesday, which means this weekend is really the time for all of the –ists to celebrate. And whether they’re designing super-spooky costumes or talking about the super-spooky upcoming elections, we’d say that they’re doing a fine job of it.

Every time someone comes to visit Seattlest from our pre-Emerald City life there's a moment when the two of us arrive at a crosswalk and Seattlest pulls up in strict abeyance of law and social conditioning and our friend charges through the light, only to recognize sometime halfway down the next block that we're still waiting for the white walking guy signal. When we catch up we explain the situation: Pedestrians obey the traffic signals here. In return, drivers generally slam on the brakes for anyone on foot who looks like they have even the vaguest idea of crossing the street. It takes a little getting used to, but it generally works. Everyone smiles and nods during our little spiel and then they leave and tell the world about how weird we are. "He changed, man."

Call us crazy. Crazy about chicken—especially the organs.

-The claims of "white washing Islamists" continue in some paper called the Washington Times today in an article that revolves around the sanity of Naveed Haq. This is also a local meme.

Maybe it started when we found out the Urban Hike domain is actually owned by a Pittsburgh group. Pittsburgh, we thought. Huh.

Mayor Greg Nickels delivered a State of the City speech on Monday that hit on a bunch of Seattlest's favorite talking points, but failed to mention the growing divide between the mayor's office and the parks department and various neighborhood groups in the city. That's gotta be a tough one to swallow for neighborhoods whose primary complaint seems to be the lack of acknowledgement of their complaints.