What seems as inexhaustible as the universe is the length our society will go to justify what in every respect makes little to no sense: the dominance of automobiles. It’s so costly, it’s so destructive, it’s daily warming our one and only planet to levels that are catastrophic. But pay no mind to any of those hard facts, says The Seattle Times, whose grip on reality has always been far from impressive. What’s more important than life is the freedom of our cars. This mode of thinking, called necroeconomics, is behind the paper’s recent and bizarre claim that the current pedestrian-friendly pilot program at Pike Place Market has gone too far and is even doing more damage than good. How? Get this: Because urban solutions that don’t involve the automobile are, by their very nature, unbalanced.
In the case of Pike Place Market, this lack of balance has also “[created] a new hazard, given that delivery and emergency vehicles must regularly access Pike Place daily.” And what is this new hazard? Pedestrians will become too tame to recognize the alarm of an ambulance and get out of the way. The danger posed by cars is, according to this line of thinking, what keeps pedestrians on their toes. The Seattle Times: “Before the street closure pilot project, Market pedestrians were prepared to encounter vehicles. Now, some pedestrians mistakenly believe that the project bans all traffic.” It’s hard to believe that someone in a big city actually wrote that. Pedestrians without cars on the street will become like the stupid fox that, because it had never encountered a human before, “allowed [Charles Darwin] to walk behind him and actually kill him with [a] geological hammer.”
tl;dr we saved pike place from the wrecking ball and now we’re going to save it from pedestrians
— Qagggy! (@qagggy.bsky.social) September 2, 2025 at 4:56 PM
The Urbanist‘s Ryan Packer reports that Route 8 will continue to be a miserable experience for thousands of riders because the Seattle Department of Transportation (which really should be called the Seattle Department of Automobiles (SDOA)) has “ruled out reallocating additional space on the most congested part of Denny Way for bus-only lanes.” What the SDOA fears more than anything else is a significant “increase [in] delays for drivers on Denny Way.”
King County Metro, surely, this was not the best timing: Increasing adult bus ticket prices on Labor Day. (It went up by 25 cents.) What were you thinking? What kind of message were you trying to send to workers? And besides, bus transportation should be free because riders actually provide a public good to society. In fact, to compensate for the considerable negative impact of car ownership, drivers should pay people to use public transportation. In a truly balanced world, an Orca card would receive cash when a rider boarded a train or a bus.
I don’t want to sound like I’m ragging on the Seattle Times, but it posted another story that seems completely out of touch with reality. This one concerns the large number of empty office buildings in downtown Seattle. What’s to be done about this nuisance? Unemployment in the city is still low. And post-pandemic “return-to-office mandates” are “widespread.” And yet “more than a third of downtown Seattle offices are still empty.” (It’s 25 percent in Bellevue.) But what if going back to the good old days is not the solution? What if we no longer see downtown as a business center but, instead, as a recreational and residential one? Last week, downtown was packed—people here, people there. But they were not going to or coming from work. They were going to or coming from this and that event. And what I saw with my own eyes was confirmed by this story in KIRO: “Downtown Seattle hotels break record with $126M revenue in July.”
But wait a minute. The Seattle Times is not all bad. Occasionally something interesting appears in its pages. Such is the case with this new report by Gene Balk: “As Seattle grew, the number of cars here has barely budged since 2017.” The close to 100,000 people who moved to the city since 2017 added no cars. From Balk: “Census data shows the number of vehicles in the city has been effectively unchanged for years, even as the number of households has grown.” But still we’re left with the SDOA.
As for the weather, we are now, it seems, at the torii gate to a season that will banish temperatures in the 80s. Today, a high of 79 is expected. But in just 6 days, the high will be down to 69. When that happens, we of the vampire class, those who love the cold and loath exposure to the full power of the biggest star in our sky, will rise from our air conditioned coffins and, with dusty and dusk-longing lungs, sing: ‘These are the good times.”
The governors of Washington, Oregon, and California announced today that will follow Canada’s vaccine guidelines and not the US’s—just kidding. The plan is to establish their own, science-based guidelines because the CDC under RFK has become a dangerous joke.
A new model of the universe sees its birth not in inflation but in gravitational waves first postulated by Einstein over a hundred years ago (and confirmed in 2015 by researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). It is believed that the waves were caused by the collision of two massive black holes. The link between gravitational waves and the birth of the universe is seen by theorists based in Spain as more plausible and verifiable than the standard one between inflation and creation.
Speaking About Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity claims that time stops at the speed of light. This means that the universe, for a photon, a unit of light, has, all at once, reached its end and has no beginning. And so here we are. What makes the world visible to us, and is captured by the evidence of photo-sensitive chemicals, has, in itself, never been here and never will be.
Let’s end Slog AM with a track I heard yesterday at the Baja Bistro on Beacon Hill, Rels B’s “Pa Quererte.” I Shazamed it because it reminded me of another, very popular track by a Canadian rapper.
