4 ms·

You can live in an urban neighborhood and only use your car a few times a week (mostly on weekends and for yearly kid doctor visits). Its not just Manhattan, Se

You can live in an urban neighborhood and only use your car a few times a week (mostly on weekends and for yearly kid doctor visits). Its not just Manhattan, Seattle supports this as well (well, you still "need" a car, but you can get away with not driving it very often). You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house 7 minutes away from your kid's K-8 and 10 minutes away from his future 9-12, with grocery stores and dentists nearby).

scuol 1y ago
s/strategic/wealthy/ I agree there are places in Seattle one can do this, but boy one certainly needs the paper to do this.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real. If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millionaires in the 90s and 00s. You won’t save much money there.
    - lelandbatey 1y ago
      Yeah, the Eastside is a real estate hellscape. Everything east of Lake Washington till highway 203/18 is genuinely quite bad. I had cheaper rent on top of Queen Anne, 1 block from the Trader Joe's, than any place of comparable walk/transit on the east side ($2065/month for a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom apartment+1 parking place, ~950sq/ft).
      - lodovic 1y ago
        Really curious what would amount to 1.75 bathroom, I'm unfamiliar with the concept. One full bathroom and a second with just a a toilet/sink combination?
        seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        That is 1.5. A 1.75 is usually a small bathroom with a shower. The space would have no room for a tub. These often get counted as full baths anyways.
        ghaff 1y ago
        Yeah. A lot of us prefer a shower to a bathtub with shower anyway. But it's probably an important distinction for people with kids especially.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        Why stop at WA-18, though? I-90 is wide and not particularly busy past that point even at peak times, so you can easily get to North Bend in only a few more minutes. The real cutoff point for commuting to Seattle is just past exit 34, because that's where they close Snoqualmie Pass when there's too much snow.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      With traffic, Tacoma isn’t very viable. Also I have a relative who commuted to his job in Tacoma from…west Seattle (granted they bought in the late 80s). It was an easy reverse commute (so close to actually 30 minutes?), going the other way is hard and you can only win with the train (sounder) or maybe bus. Link is making its way down to federal way soon (or already?) but that assumes you work near a station or it quickly becomes not competitive with driving. My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour. You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.
      - bobthepanda 1y ago
        The ferry is also so expensive that you’d probably eat up a lot of savings using that as your commute method.
        seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        It depends how often you need to show up at the office. Honestly, if you live near the dock and work downtown, and only need to show up 2 days a week, it can work. Otherwise it sounds like too much if a hassle to me..
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Yeah, it varies in a lot of cities. I live about an hour (given not a lot of traffic--hah!) west of Boston and the real estate prices aren't cheap but not crazy. A lot of the tech industry was out that way anyway historically until pharma and outposts of west coast companies took over Kendall Square. But certainly a lot of the coastal towns north and south of the city are pretty pricey.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  You make a tradeoff. You are still going to plop down $1 million for a home unless you live way out there, but instead of a 2000 foot SFH in Bothell or Lynwood, you make do with a 1250 foot townhome in Ballard (same price, less property taxes, more urban). Ballard isn't exactly Capitol Hill or Queen Anne either (we thought about Magnolia just across the locks, but it made me think that I would at least need an electric cargo bike to make most days work without a car).
  - scuol 1y ago
    Totally agree. I'm renting on the eastside at the moment, but places like Ballard and Magnolia are on my list of places to look to buy for the very reasons you mentioned. Having more space in these exurbs is "nice", but you pay the time tax every time you want to do something. I remember coming here mid-pandemic and having white picket fences in my eyes as the company pointed me to a real estate agent. Thank god I didn't pull the trigger and buy because I would've been financially trapped (upside down) in some very unsafe urban area (e.g. south Seattle) or far-flung place (like Sultan).
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      You probably wouldn't be upside down in south Seattle, just maybe not that happy. But if you don't have kids, Georgetown is (or at least was) the hip area to be in ATM.
gertlex 1y ago
> You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house ... I wonder what % (presumably low) of the population can live in SFHs and achieve this cities like Seattle. I should try finding if there's available work that's made visualizations of this sort of things ("How many homes could be within X miles or minutes of A B and C" for SFH, Quadplex, 5-over-1s etc.)
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  You aren’t exactly going to find an SFH in the suburbs that is much cheaper. So you have a point, but you have to choose between an SFH, a similar priced townhome (basically an SFH without a yard), or a condo with an HOA, all basically unaffordable unless you want to commute from Kent or Marysville. Seattle still has density (the townhome I live in in Ballard is one of three that used to be one SFH).
  - gertlex 1y ago
    Indeed. My intended purpose of such a tool would be to crudely illustrate the impracticality of everyone aspiring to such housing ;)
- divbzero 1y ago
  Walk Score can provide an estimate of walkability for any given address. https://www.walkscore.com/ https://www.walkscore.com/
echelon 1y ago
Self-driving cars are going to turn America's car-centric "hellscape" into a superpower with untold second order benefits. Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life. Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly. All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  just one more lane bro I swear that's it it's just one more lane then the traffic will go away
  - KingMob 1y ago
    Road lanes are like CPU cores. And like CPUs, adding more cores does not linearly scale up traffic capacity. In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      That's why we are focusing on adding GPU cores instead, but they can only do the same operation on a lot of data in parallel (much like mass transit).
    - rcpt 1y ago
      Adding more lanes encourages more driving. That's why it never reduces traffic
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        Same with computers. More power and bandwidth and storage space has largely meant our apps and websites have grown to fill it.

scuol 1y ago

s/strategic/wealthy/ I agree there are places in Seattle one can do this, but boy one certainly needs the paper to do this.

bobthepanda 1y ago
Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real. If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millionaires in the 90s and 00s. You won’t save much money there.
  - lelandbatey 1y ago
    Yeah, the Eastside is a real estate hellscape. Everything east of Lake Washington till highway 203/18 is genuinely quite bad. I had cheaper rent on top of Queen Anne, 1 block from the Trader Joe's, than any place of comparable walk/transit on the east side ($2065/month for a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom apartment+1 parking place, ~950sq/ft).
    - lodovic 1y ago
      Really curious what would amount to 1.75 bathroom, I'm unfamiliar with the concept. One full bathroom and a second with just a a toilet/sink combination?
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        That is 1.5. A 1.75 is usually a small bathroom with a shower. The space would have no room for a tub. These often get counted as full baths anyways.
        ghaff 1y ago
        Yeah. A lot of us prefer a shower to a bathtub with shower anyway. But it's probably an important distinction for people with kids especially.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Why stop at WA-18, though? I-90 is wide and not particularly busy past that point even at peak times, so you can easily get to North Bend in only a few more minutes. The real cutoff point for commuting to Seattle is just past exit 34, because that's where they close Snoqualmie Pass when there's too much snow.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    With traffic, Tacoma isn’t very viable. Also I have a relative who commuted to his job in Tacoma from…west Seattle (granted they bought in the late 80s). It was an easy reverse commute (so close to actually 30 minutes?), going the other way is hard and you can only win with the train (sounder) or maybe bus. Link is making its way down to federal way soon (or already?) but that assumes you work near a station or it quickly becomes not competitive with driving. My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour. You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      The ferry is also so expensive that you’d probably eat up a lot of savings using that as your commute method.
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        It depends how often you need to show up at the office. Honestly, if you live near the dock and work downtown, and only need to show up 2 days a week, it can work. Otherwise it sounds like too much if a hassle to me..
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Yeah, it varies in a lot of cities. I live about an hour (given not a lot of traffic--hah!) west of Boston and the real estate prices aren't cheap but not crazy. A lot of the tech industry was out that way anyway historically until pharma and outposts of west coast companies took over Kendall Square. But certainly a lot of the coastal towns north and south of the city are pretty pricey.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
You make a tradeoff. You are still going to plop down $1 million for a home unless you live way out there, but instead of a 2000 foot SFH in Bothell or Lynwood, you make do with a 1250 foot townhome in Ballard (same price, less property taxes, more urban). Ballard isn't exactly Capitol Hill or Queen Anne either (we thought about Magnolia just across the locks, but it made me think that I would at least need an electric cargo bike to make most days work without a car).
- scuol 1y ago
  Totally agree. I'm renting on the eastside at the moment, but places like Ballard and Magnolia are on my list of places to look to buy for the very reasons you mentioned. Having more space in these exurbs is "nice", but you pay the time tax every time you want to do something. I remember coming here mid-pandemic and having white picket fences in my eyes as the company pointed me to a real estate agent. Thank god I didn't pull the trigger and buy because I would've been financially trapped (upside down) in some very unsafe urban area (e.g. south Seattle) or far-flung place (like Sultan).
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    You probably wouldn't be upside down in south Seattle, just maybe not that happy. But if you don't have kids, Georgetown is (or at least was) the hip area to be in ATM.

gertlex 1y ago

> You need to be strategic about where you live (e.g. buying the house ... I wonder what % (presumably low) of the population can live in SFHs and achieve this cities like Seattle. I should try finding if there's available work that's made visualizations of this sort of things ("How many homes could be within X miles or minutes of A B and C" for SFH, Quadplex, 5-over-1s etc.)

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
You aren’t exactly going to find an SFH in the suburbs that is much cheaper. So you have a point, but you have to choose between an SFH, a similar priced townhome (basically an SFH without a yard), or a condo with an HOA, all basically unaffordable unless you want to commute from Kent or Marysville. Seattle still has density (the townhome I live in in Ballard is one of three that used to be one SFH).
- gertlex 1y ago
  Indeed. My intended purpose of such a tool would be to crudely illustrate the impracticality of everyone aspiring to such housing ;)
divbzero 1y ago
Walk Score can provide an estimate of walkability for any given address. https://www.walkscore.com/ https://www.walkscore.com/

echelon 1y ago

Self-driving cars are going to turn America's car-centric "hellscape" into a superpower with untold second order benefits. Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life. Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly. All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.

sorcerer-mar 1y ago
just one more lane bro I swear that's it it's just one more lane then the traffic will go away
- KingMob 1y ago
  Road lanes are like CPU cores. And like CPUs, adding more cores does not linearly scale up traffic capacity. In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    That's why we are focusing on adding GPU cores instead, but they can only do the same operation on a lot of data in parallel (much like mass transit).
  - rcpt 1y ago
    Adding more lanes encourages more driving. That's why it never reduces traffic
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      Same with computers. More power and bandwidth and storage space has largely meant our apps and websites have grown to fill it.