Comments on izenmania: Walkable Tacoma: Dan Burden

while by just seeing at the article itself, Dan Bu...

2011-12-04T10:58:16.361-08:00

while by just seeing at the article itself, Dan Burden's lecture is really wonderful. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful information, so in return I would like to share about a website of the South Sound called papakali.com where the readers themselves are adding their own version of stories to the already existing tales of the South Sound, and the most interesting part is that the stories found in this website are real as they are written by real people.

while by just seeing at the article itself, Dan Bu...

2011-12-04T10:57:58.459-08:00

The talk was videotaped and he said he was making ...

2008-05-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

The talk was videotaped and he said he was making the powerpoint files available to the organizers, so hopefully some of it will make its way to the public at some point.

Thanks, Izen, for writing about the lecture. I'm s...

2008-05-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Izen, for writing about the lecture. I'm so sorry that I missed it. I'm really kicking myself about it now. Please do post more; it will be read carefully.

Jen, You are speaking my mind for me today. Thanks. I have my own little non-walkable neighborhood combined with poor transit story from yesterday; I'll post a blog on it soon.

I think that it's understandable that he didn't em...

2008-05-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

I think that it's understandable that he didn't emphasize transit. Transit is a solution to deal with the situation at hand (aprawled cities with clustured retail), without dealing with the situation itself. A good transit system helps people function in a car-oriented city design when they don't have a car. The focus of his presentation was the need to move city design to the point where we don't need to provide motor vehicles just to get pedestrians to their grocery store, etc.

Anyway, I have a whole blog entry to flesh that notion out in coming in a day or two. I was actually at the Red Hot, with the aforementioned bloggers, and intended to bus down to the event. Of course, the bus was just ahead of schedule, so I missed it, and then had to walk/catch the next one. Fortunately made it with moments to spare.

I think Tacoma's central neighborhoods are already...

2008-05-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

I think Tacoma's central neighborhoods are already very walkable. It takes me about five minutes to walk to the 6th Ave business district from my house, maybe 20 to walk to Proctor. I feel safe walking around here any time during daylight hours, and homes are close to each other and connected by walkable streets with sidewalks.

The transit piece is the important missing link, though. For example, I initially wanted to go to that lecture last night but opted instead to meet up with the blogosphere at the Red Hot, because going would mean taking my unreliable bus line that only runs every half hour, or driving and paying for parking.

This is unacceptable for a neighborhood a five minute drive from downtown, on a route that connects downtown to a major business district, (Proctor) a university, (UPS) and a community college with a transit center. I would love to rely less on my car but I'm not presented with real options. It's too bad he didn't talk about transit. I feel strongly that this is one of the top three issues Tacoma needs to address more or less immediately.