Protests that recently shut down I-5 have reignited a debate that goes back to the freeway’s beginning. Complicating the narrative of critics who believe major American thoroughfares should remain free of protest is the inconvenient fact that Interstate 5 was steeped in it from the beginning. A few years
An excerpt from my new book, Heartbreak City, shows how Seattle kicked off a nationwide bike policing trend. A distant frontier city that had only recently been deemed one of the great metropolises of the United States, Seattle pioneered an unprecedented experiment in public safety in 1987. In the go-go
The 1968 and 1970 Forward Thrust campaign was a slate of 13 ballot initiatives, put before voters in Seattle and King County to correct the harmful excesses of the area’s post-WWII, car-centric, consumer-focused rise. The heart of the Forward Thrust capital improvement projects—twelve funded by bond debt, one
The disappointment that urbanists feel about Seattle’s failure to obtain a subway system in 1968 (see part one and part two of the Forward Thrust series) reminds me of… professional sports: the aspirations and the disappointment; the recrimination and lost opportunities; the parsing over stats and precinct data for
The Forward Thrust bond initiatives of 1968 and 1970 were a success because of their ambition. They were also failures because of their myopia. In this essay—the second installment of a four-part series I’m proud to have published here in The Urbanist—I want to take a look
In December 2017 I had the fortune to pen, in my capacity as a columnist for City Arts Magazine, a retrospective essay about the impact of the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives. I looked backwards to Forward Thrust because I thought history could provide political answers that the self-proclaimed “progressive” present