Seattle Problems

Seattle has turned into a lefty distopian nightmare. There are many great and wonderful things about the place, and lots of people who used to live there still work there, for all of those good reasons. However the housing crisis, inflated by investors using Seattle's real-estate market as a piggy bank, and shockingly bad transportation policy has made Seattle basically unlivable for families. Here I will get into some details, and the one and only solution to Seattle's problems (driverless cars.)

People who think Seattle is family friendly, for some reason, seem to love to point out yuppie waterfront-neighborhood Belltown as the ideal example. It is the last place I have worked or lived in, including some of the worst neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, that I would ever want to raise a family in:

1. A quick glance on Redfin suggests the prices on condos in Belltown range from just under $400,000 to just over $2,000,000. People with kids have responsibilities beyond showing up to work on time and doing all that off-the-clock training their employer demands, and have precious little time for sucking up to bosses after hours, and as a result generally don't have the kind of priorities it takes to afford an $800,000 condo. And news flash: healthy kids make noise, and they don't wait to go outside to do it; smart and active children should be arguing with their parents, running around the house, jumping off of furniture, wrestling, playing loud music and otherwise being completely incompatible with condo life. So that's $800,000 for a condo that is bad for your kids.
2. Families having fled Belltown long ago, it has been for decades now one giant Jerry-Springer-like singles club, and as a result has the worst crime rate in Metro Seattle. No hard working kid from a mid west college or India, with serious intentions of starting a family, is going to be interested in living in that cesspool. Seriously, when vigilantes in Seattle go looking for crime to stop, they go to Belltown:

So every lefty Utopian scheme imaginable has been applied to Belltown and completely failed the future of he human race.  And it's not like bus stops connect you to buses that go anywhere of significance in Belltown, nor would there be any parking, nor is there a light rail stop in Belltown. You better not need to go anywhere during rush our, because you simply aren't going to get there. Though not as bad as Belltown, the rest of Seattle suffers from similar problems.

And here's what they are doing to fix the problem: replacing a major transportation viaduct with a tunnel of less capacity, and trying to establish tolls on roads down town. All of this will push more traffic onto I-5, which already routinely comes to a stand still almost every rush hour. In other words an impressively disastrous problem is about to get a lot worse.

How did this happen; aren't commies supposed to be good at infrastructure building? In the 1970's America was preparing for the future with huge infrastructure projects, most importantly serious subway systems, which are now the backbones of major metropolitan areas like NYC, Chicago, LA and Atlanta. Atlanta!? Isn't Seattle bigger than that? How did they get one and Seattle didn't? Atlanta got Seattle's subway because voters in Seattle didn't want one!

See, it is a simple issue of ideology vs. pragmatism. You can have all the post-modern, marxist, misandry-based, city-wide-strike having, granola eating ideology you want, but if you have no thought in the world for practicality, then your ideology:

1. Has never mattered.
2. Currently does not matter in any meaningful way.
3. Never will matter at any possible point in the future.

And now we get to the heart of the problem with popular solutions to Seattle's problems, which is that everyone should just simply ride the bus or a bike to work. The problem for parents is time. Every second we are not with our kids, we are risking raising future prostitutes, violent criminals or Belltown inhabitants. If we indulge in the guilty pleasure of taking time for ourselves to go to the gym, take a shower or sleep, that time is incredibly precious.

The problem with the Bus or a Bike is it demands your attention. You can't e-mail or watch the news on your bike for hopefully-obvious-reasons-to-even-someone-like-you. But you can't do this on the Bus either, because the bus also demands your attention, the bus driver does not guarantee you will get off the bus when you are supposed to. Because it is so easy to miss your stop on a bus, it is impossible to accomplish meaningful activity on a bus ride.

I take an hour long ferry ride to Seattle for work. It is never too crowded to have a seat. I don't have to drive, I don't have to peddle and dodge texting drivers, and when the boat stops, if the legions of fellow commuters getting up and leaving doesn't catch my attention, ferry staff will personally come by and make sure I know it is time to get off the one and only possible stop for the vehicle. I get tons of work done on the ferry. I even occasionally get some Netflix in on the ferry - real, actual entertainment - an unheard of luxury for most parents.

My co-workers try to express sympathy for the long commute. But when they leave the workplace at 4PM, how long do you think it takes them to get home? They might only live 20 minutes away at 2 AM in the morning, but in Seattle rush our traffic that often takes longer and ends up being more expensive than my ferry ride. When I lived in Seattle I used to take crowded buses to work that took just as long. I even rode my bike and admittedly got to work a few minutes quicker, but it was incredibly dangerous and it was easy to get a flat tire, so it wasn't very reliable.

And *driving* to work in a car in Seattle - if it isn't painfully obvious already - is no kind of solution. The experience is dreadful, terribly slow traffic with horrible drivers. Parking is... I don't even know how to explain it to someone who doesn't live in Seattle... but essentially the Seattle City Council has for decades tried to prevent people from driving downtown by not having parking spaces... you can easily pay over $20 a day for parking downtown, and it's not likely to be very close to the destination your are trying to get to.

Taxis are too expensive for anyone to commute to work daily in. Ubers though more affordable have other problems that illustrate other problems from driver-based transportation: if you can trust the driver to get you where you are going without constantly looking over their shoulder, they will often want to talk with you, making it impossible for you to be productive. Then there is the question of reliability, will your Uber driver show up on time, if at all?

So the solution is ferry rides for all parents. What that means in practice is diverless cars. In a driverless vehicle you will be able to stretch out your feet and relax, almost as well as on a ferry.  You will be able to pull out your cellphone or laptop and get very caught up on many things you need to do, and you might even be able to get caught up on your favorite Youtube channel. It will show up much faster than a bus or ferry, and will be a lot more affordable than an Uber, least bit a Taxi.

Some cities can get by with condos and subways, and still end up being family friendly. Not Seattle, our history has been catastrophically consumed by ideological delusions trumping practical reality. But there is a way out of this mess in the future, and that is driverless cars. No city's future is as dependent on this emerging technology as Seattle!