Ray Dubicki
Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.
The short answer is 153, but the long answer is that we are too young to act this old.
Seattle was founded in 1851 and incorporated as a city in 1869. So, 171 years or 153 years, depending on which you want to use. Either way, it’s longer than...
When we hit that button to order food through an app, systems engage long supply chains, billions in venture capital, and thousands of people. The impact this has on cities shows up in disappearing cab stands and overwhelmed restaurants. When it comes to the people end of the equation,...
On Tuesday, GrubHub sent New York restaurants into a tailspin with a free lunch promotion. Between 11am and 2pm, the food delivery app offered $15 off any order made from restaurants around the city. Grubhub’s platform crashed as it was receiving 6,000 orders a minute. Restaurants saw queues blast...
A good amount of the work that we do here at The Urbanist involves pointing out where the region's governance and foresight are lacking. We review a lot of plans and pick them apart pretty hard. Sometimes it's a disagreement on process. Sometimes it's a dive into the numbers....
The Ballard Bridge is a 105-year-old connection between the industrial Interbay neighborhood and thriving Ballard. With four lanes of moving traffic and completely insufficient sidewalks, it is a barrier. Seattle has plans to replace the bridge, but the flawed proposals focus on car speed rather than neighborhoods.
In this episode,...
Urban issues are not unique to one city. Casting around for for successes to copy, we have to examine what it means to remix and adapt a concept to a new situation.
Really, there’s no better teacher for doing that right than “Weird” Al Yankovic.
Since his time sending parody songs...
For the last five months, a double-digit percentage of my time was spent working through two of Seattle’s larger Draft Environmental Impact Statements (EIS). In early March, I submitted comments on the Industrial and Maritime Strategy Draft EIS. Yesterday, I submitted comments for the West Seattle Ballard Link Extension...
The first thing you have to know about this podcast is that I just got back from Disneyland and the Star Wars Rise of the Resistance ride was AMAZING. In this episode, managing editor Natalie Argerious and I cover all the ways it was awesome, why it's even awesomer...