Today Is the Last Day for Pronto: The city will begin dismantling the system, which consists of 54 stations and 500 bikes, on Monday. Pronto will then spend time in the dark of storage as Seattle looks for a city that will buy it. What to make of all this? Seattle may not be such a big bike town. We have nothing on Portland when comes to that mode of transportation, but Portland has nothing on us when it comes to walking. There might just be in Seattle too much noise about bikes and not enough about pedestrians, who, like Link, have made huge gains over the years. Josh Feit provided the impressive pedestrian data in his 2016 post “Increase in Walking Outpaced All Other Modes of Commuting.” 2015, pedestrians were nearly 11 percent of Seattle’s 407,361 commuters, and bikes only 4 percent.
Seattle Times‘s Solution to Seattle’s Housing Crisis? Homeownership. The city, says Seattle Times commentator Brier Dudley, should not upzone and build more apartments. It should instead encourage homeownership, because that kind of living “provides stability, the opportunity for upward mobility and true affordability over the long term.” Do you know what this sounds like? It sounds like someone who missed the housing crash of 2008—missed the collapse of George Bush’s “Ownership Society,” missed the bubble it created, and missed the millions of foreclosures after the bubble burst.
Yes, the city has an affordability crisis, and it is also true that the fast-growing housing market, as it is currently managed and modeled, will not provide nearly enough places for people who earn reality wages. But the solution is certainly not to stop building and to sing the praises of homeowners, who Dudley sees as paying for all this livability-diminishing density with their property taxes. (No word is mentioned about how home loans are only possible with enormous government support or of the huge federal-level tax breaks homeowners enjoy.) In short, Dudley is talking/writing/singing nonsense. Also “urban workers all living in apartments near their office towers” is not, as he maintains, a “Utopian vision”; it is a concrete utopia. It exists in many parts of the world that is here and now.
A Weak Tornado Visited Monroe, Washington Yesterday: Though it hurt no one, it managed to rattle some human and tree souls, toss some trash about, knock down two RVs, one of which flattened a car. Its time in the town, which is not far from Echo Lake, was, thankfully, brief.
Performer Falls From Swings During Cirque du Soleil Event in Redmond:She was flying through the air in the middle of a swing-to-swing act. Something went wrong up there and she fell down, fell on her back. She was taken away on a gurney, and the show did what all shows must do in situations like this: go on.
Month of May Will Bring Another Wave of Job Cuts at Boeing: Money going to jobs instead of profits has always been a big problem for the owners of companies. The CEO of Boeing, Kevin McAllister, knows all about this problem. He feels it very deeply. He has vowed to “aggressively” cut spending in the Puget Sound region in 2017. Money must not behave like objects under the laws of gravity. It must go up, not down. Puget Sound Business Journal reports that Boeing recently filed for the elimination 245 positions that are bringing lots of money down to earth.
The Atlanta Horror: After a massive fire destroyed a bridge on a highway that carries 250,000 cars a day, transportation experts in Atlanta are concerned that “many commuters in some of Atlanta’s densely populated northern suburbs will have to find alternate routes or ride public transit.” The bridge will not be repaired any time soon. Indeed, its destruction may transform the whole city of Atlanta, which, like LA, is often seen by urbanists as all that’s wrong in the 100-year marriage between cars and the city.
Cherry Blossoms at University of Washington Remind Us of the Transience of Beauty and Life:
ワシントン大学の桜 (cherry blossoms at University of Washington) https://t.co/Inxo2xkj4K
— ノマディック・リアジェット32 (@nomad_ozland) March 31, 2017
And now for a Japanese ghost story that involves a cherry tree. It’s called “A Tale of Ingwa”, and can be found in a book, In Ghostly Japan, by the great Lafcadio Hearn.
Set in the house of a daimyo (a feudal ruler), the story concerned an old woman who was dying and a young woman who was taking care of her (both were married to the same man). After being ill for three years, the old woman (she is not named in the story) realized that the end had arrived, she was going to die at any moment. She called for the young woman (she is named Yukiko) and made a final request. The cherry tree in the garden was in full bloom and she wanted to see the flowers one last time. Yukiko, of course, agreed to fulfill the old woman’s final wish. Pleased, the old woman asked Yukiko to turn around so that she could hold on to her back for support. Yukiko dutifully offered her back. The old woman then put her hands onto Yukiko’s shoulders, rose up from the bed, and, step by slow step, was led to the tree in the garden.
But once there, the old woman did not look at the blossoms; she instead shoved her hands into Yukiko’s kimono, grabbed her breasts, and yelled, “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom in the garden! Such a delight!” After that, she died. But when she died, her hands did not release Yukiko’s breasts. The husband returned home and saw in the garden the dead old woman clinging to his young wife. He tried to remove the fingers, but each attempt drew blood.
A doctor was called to the house. He examined the hands and the breasts, and he saw that the old flesh had fused with the young flesh. The only thing he could do was cut the hands off at the wrist. The operation was difficult (the old woman’s skin was rough and tough) and very messy (pus and blood spilled all over the floor).
But that was not the end or the worst of it. Yukiko not only had to spend the rest of her life with the darkened and dried hands on her breasts, but now and then they would come alive and squeeze her breasts in that calculating way a shopper squeezes ripe fruit in a grocery store. This happened sometimes in the morning and other times at night—these dead things drawing devilish delight from the living.
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