![]() They bought lunch, sat at picnic tables, conversed. People streamed in and out of the station. What had been a dead end was now a hub, a portal. Wandering the streets around the U District station that afternoon, you could feel the neighborhood being transformed. Now I could leave my Capitol Hill apartment, walk for ten minutes, board the train and be whisked away to the heart of U District in what felt like a heartbeat - no bus transfer, no hike through campus. I almost forgot it was ever going to open. in the University District so many times over the past few years, it began to feel like a permanent feature of the neighborhood. I biked and walked past that construction site at NE 43rd St. For people who don’t drive, it makes the city feel more like home. An event like that transforms the topology of the city, drawing close together points that were once so distant as to feel totally disconnected. ![]() ![]() That’s what made the opening of three new light rail stations earlier this month so thrilling. Seattle has been making progress on its multimodal infrastructure, and some streets are safe, beautiful and well-designed - but take a wrong turn, and very quickly you can feel like an unwelcome stranger in your own city. Sometimes it takes so long to cobble together a bus trip from here to there, it’s almost faster to walk. Biking on most streets is not for the faint of heart. Cars whiz by, spewing exhaust and, if it’s especially wet, plowing up great sprays of dirty water that don’t respect the boundaries of the sidewalk. Anyone who’s ever been carless in Seattle knows the feeling that your city wasn’t really built for you.
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