Comments on Better Recognize
The author must be Nostradamus because we are far from his description of the two cities. And I think all the cities from Everett to Surrey want to be considered suburbs of Seattle and Vancouver.
Double or triple the population of North America and we'll talk.
You know if there is one thing that represents that unconsciousness more than any other it's that most folks don't realize/understand/appreciate the fact that the city is on a large, unique body of water. Spend a sunny day out on Puget Sound (not "the" Puget Sound dammit) and you will be almost alone, relatively speaking. Hundreds of square miles of open space with what, 2,000 people out there? In the middle of a city of 7 million. Go sailing.
I don't think "Seattle" is going to be the operative mentally mapped place around here. Seattle is just a small part of the region we live in -- the largest part, but far from a majority of it. As I've said over and over, the real action is in the exurbs. Seattle may be building new condos, but out in the sticks they're building entirely new CITIES. Seriously, go take a look at Smokey Point. Most of the people in the region will even more so now believe that Seattle (and Vancouver) have nothing to do with their lives.
its not 1 city. seattle peters out in arlington, vancouver doesn't even make it to the border.
that's not to say that high-speed rail shouldn't link portland to vancouver, and within my lifetime (i'm slated to die sometime between 2043-2053).
But Max, the Seattle conurbation is creeping north at about 5-10 miles per year.
Wouldnt it make more sense to grow back eastward?
Rail? You're dreaming. We have decided not to do rail. We have no plan. We have no right of way. We simply intend to let the entire I 5 corridor develop more and more -- maybe we'll try to gggrab the right of way for high spped rail in about 2025 after years of debate and study -- then it will cost oomuch.
So give it up. We have non-decided our way into a decision to not do high speed rail. MEanwhile, in France they just developed a train that goes 357 mph and in Switzerland they just build a 21 mile long tunnel under the Alps for $3.5 billion (what our little ol' 2-mile Viaduct tunnel would have cost prior to the last round of cost increases that added another billion or so).
We do roads, not rail. The entire I 5 corridor will fill with sprawl.
look at that great hotel near the casino near the new outlet mall-- and let sprawl spread, then around 2025 officials will say "hey we should have high speed rail to fight global warming -- these short flights to Vancouver and Portland are killing the atmosphere" then study it for ten years then conclude, alas, we can't afford to condemn thousands of condos, casinos, malls and other sprawly things.
@6 - eastward? into the cascades and forests? That is not really possible. So since the west is all water the only way for seattle to grow is north and south and infilling.
also this is not even a remotely new idea. The concept of a megalopolis sometimes refered to as "Cascadia", extending from roughly eugene to north van has been around for decades.
Well, Cascadia isn't always imagined as a megalopolis.
About the article: Why exactly is Walter Bejamin showing up in it?
Seconding the Marysville-Arlington-Stanwood growth issue. I just went up to Lake Goodwin this weekend and saw the new Costco/Target/Best Buy/etc. complex for the first time. I was astounded...it was jam-packed with people and not even all the stores are built yet. So the demand for the commerce is fulfilled even before it's finished; it's not like those stores are sitting empty waiting for sprawl to come to them...the stores are coming to the sprawl that's already there. That area still has a long way to go before the population numbers match even Everett-Lynnwood or Bellevue-Redmond and shows no signs of slowing down.
south east. surely there is room to the south east, and more dense options in issaquah.
I think in I read in a scifi book, in the future San Francisco and Seattle merged into one city, and San Diego and Los Angeles merged into another one. But that is like 500 years in the future.
@13: Not really much more can fit in there. Issaquah is already sitting at the foothills, and Hwy 18 from there into Auburn is filling up pretty rapidly wherever there is enough spare flat land. After that you're into Puyallup, which is about as developed as it can get, or head down to Maple Valley/Enumclaw, which is sprawling just as fast as north Snohomish.
@13 - yeah and that auburn valley/maple valley area is exploding as well(just drive down 167 or 169 anytime of day) but eventually it will run up against the wall of the cascades.
cant they build on the foothills? i look over that way often times and wonder why they havent regraded and expanded already.
one of the hardest parts about living in seattle is realizing that things are so close to one another in miles but so far in actual transportation distance.
Puget Sound itself is a mental construct that doesn't map to actual geography. The term originally referred to just the southern portion of the Sound, and the geographical body of water is everything on the east side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca including the Strait of Georgia and all of Puget Sound. It's only a quirk of history that Seattle and Vancouver are separated by a national border, and it could easily have turned out differently.
But it didn't, and thanks to our respective national governments and a lot of intervening history, the political and cultural divisions are growing. Those divisions will make cooperation on transportation, development, economic cooperation, and environmental protection across the border pretty much impossible.
As for "Cascadia," it's an ahistorical term that only really means something in Washington and Oregon. The mountains aren't even called the Cascades in British Columbia. Their history books don't even recognize the concept of "Oregon Country," because from their perspective it was the "Columbia District" until the Americans swindled the southern portion.
Ecologically and geographically, there are two regions: Columbia, following the river and its tributaries, and the Puget Sound/Georgia Strait basin.
On the "silver lining" side of things, the creeping sprawl in Washington state will eventually result in a singular metro area, which bounded by mountains and water will be able to reach a region-wide density that can support a Northwest megacity. It will take decades longer than it should and destroy the regional ecosystem, though.
@17- not really, look at the epicenter of modern suburbanization Los Angeles, notice the large gaps between LA proper and palmdale,lancaster? That is the san gabriel mountains. If devolopers could build on large mountainous areas southlanders would of figured it out already.
@18 - well aware that cascadia means different things to different people. It just happens to be the most common name for the megalopolis aka mega-city that stretches from pdx to van, much like "Bo-Wash" and "eastern corridor" mean the same megalopolis from boston southward to DC.
Backwoods Blaine pretty much does an impressive job of being sufficiently hostile to both cultures to keep them from actually joining.
the mind of Seattle almost never thinks of thing else but Seattle
Heh, literally -- the mind of Seattle hardly ever thinks of even Shoreline or Burien.
"Seacouver" is not a bad portmanteau, once the megacity comes into being. I'd rather we not destroy all that nice farmland in north Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom Counties. But with the RTID beefing up highway 9 and future generations of sprawl to come that will extend that blight to the north, it's probably inevitable.
It would be nice to live in the parallel universe where there are two dense, unsprawled cities connected by high-speed rail, enjoying socialized medicine and marriage equality and surrounded by ample farms and forests.
"seacouver" would work if you didn't take Portland and its suburbs into account. Vancouver is the fastest growing city in washington and its suburbs and exurbs are pushing farther north along I-5.
Laterite -- the Costco/Target complex at Smokey Point isn't even finished yet -- there are several more big boxes going up as I type this -- and the traffic has already ground to a standstill. A bit further south at the Tulalip Casino/Home Despot/Walmart/outlet mall, the offramps routinely back up all the way onto I-5, for as much as a mile, and the Smokey Point is starting to do the same thing. This is not just traffic, but absolute standstill -- ask the people who work there, as I did, and you'll hear horror stories of having all their backroads ways to work -- the only way they can get there on time -- choking off one by one.
And that standstill is already demanding new overpasses, new exits, and new roads, lots and lots of them. Big ones. Which creates the necessary conditions for more development within reach of them, which pushes everything further north. When they reach Mount Vernon, in the next or next-but-one wave, they'll be encountering older, already-built zones, but since very little of it is designed to last for more than a couple of decades they'll just mow it down and keep going. There will be enough jobs up that way that none of the million-or-so people will need to come anywhere near Seattle.
Portland's culture might be closer to Seattle's than Vancouver (BC) is, but geographically it's much more isolated. All the development in Southwest Washington is in the Vancouver (WA) area, which is really just an extension of Portland. The natural divide between the Columbia basin and Puget Sound makes it clear these are two distinct metro areas.
HOW come that map includes Salem but not Olympia? Oly is way more important than Salem!
Aaron, your comment about Cascadia as a megalopolis is strange. I've never heard it envisioned that way. The rural and natural areas of Oregon, Washington and BC are just as crucial to the identity of Cascadia as the sprawling urban areas are.
And the comment by Cascadian that the term "Cascadia" only means something in Washington and Oregon is just plain wrong. I know many people in BC who are familiar with the concept, and if you pick up an issue of the Vancouver Sun you'll see that they have a "Cascadia" section where they report news relevant to BC, Washington and Oregon.
The population of Vancouver is very unlikely to expand below the border. Seattle will have to extend north for this vision to become reality. I don't see that happening for a LONG time. The best bet is a Seattle/Portland megalopolis. Plan for that scenario.
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