Doug Trumm
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
On Tuesday Sightline Institute's Executive Director Alan Durning and Senior Researcher Dan Bertolet published a long meditation on inclusionary zoning (IZ) economics that misrepresented several key facts and relied heavily on argument by analogy rather than empirical data. The article--although focused on how inclusionary zoning is generally problematic--actually argues...
We urbanists love cities. We spend a lot of time studying them, reading about them, writing about them, and savoring them in our own little ways.
Some urbanists have even claimed cities are the machine that kills fascists. But, alas, there's a limit to what the idea of a city can accomplish in the...
When we warned of a stroad growing in Lynnwood due to highway widening plans, it cast a negative light on Lynnwood's plans to develop a city center near its coming light rail station, due to open in 2023. Nonetheless, Lynnwood's plan for its city center is still exciting.
The City...
In the wake of last Tuesday's electoral collapse, think pieces have abounded. I've spun myself in circles and tied my stomach into knots trying to digest the indigestible. More than a few outlets have argued that cities hold the key to countering America's first orange president and the fascist...
A 25-year investment in high quality transit is a big commitment to make, but the Puget Sound Region just made it after last night's ballot drop showed Sound Transit 3 (ST3) with an insurmountable 55% to 45% lead. The Sound Transit taxing district has an estimated population of 2.8...
A lot of ink has been spilled about Sound Transit's prediction that ST3 would decrease carbon emissions by "only" an additional 130,000 metric tons in 2040 via reductions in vehicle miles traveled. Doug MacDonald argued that's inconsequential next to the embodied carbon that building the project would create in...
When I published an argument for removing I-5 from central Seattle on Monday, I hoped it would start a conversation, and it does seem to have gotten some traction. Charles Mudede added a think piece for The Stranger. Capitol Hill Seattle blog summarized my case here. Shrill KIRO talk...
Lynnwood is on a path toward disaster with its latest stroad designs for 196th St SW, a road bisecting the city's regional growth center near the Lynnwood Transit Center (also future terminus of light rail in 2023). 196th St SW is a primary arterial street linking together the communities of Edmonds, Lynnwood, Bothell, and...