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.
Seattle will permit restaurants and retail shops to open into traffic-less public streets one block at a time. Two months after the idea was publicized in local media, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that street closure permits will be available for businesses to expand into some roadways, allowing better social...
Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now are making a big ask. Their plan to reduce the Seattle Police Department budget is bound to be an uphill battle, even when a pandemic doesn’t bar in-person meetings. But the groups tried to do just that during a Community Teach In....
Bothell has opened up its Main Street for retail and restaurants in the age of social distancing. For a block of the city’s traditional downtown, barriers to traffic went up so that tents and tables could take over the right-of-way.
For anyone that thinks of Bothell as a series of...
Coquitlam, British Columbia is letting its restaurants and stores spill outside and take over their parking lots. In the name of social distancing, of course.
The city, a growing suburb of 160,000 people located east of Vancouver, has developed a plan to support its local businesses through phases of reopening....
In a normal zero-ending year, the attention of the United States at the beginning of April turns to the Census. Required by the Constitution, the Census may be groused at and argued about in court, but it always happens.
Of course, 2020 is not a normal year. But the Census...
On Friday morning, heading into the first full weekend of summer and 53 days since Governor Jay Inslee announced a phased reopening for Washington, Seattle announced expedited permitting for outdoor cafes and retail. In a statement from Mayor Jenny Durkan and Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Alex Pedersen, the City...
On Wednesday, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced a series of “paused” transportation projects to respond to the economic fallout from the Covid epidemic. The delayed projects cover many corners of the city and some parts of the transportation budget, including six Bicycle Master Plan projects, the perennially...
It’s been forty years since the first segments of the Burke-Gilman Trail opened, replacing parts of Seattle’s railway infrastructure with bicycle and pedestrian thoroughfares. The final segments—the Missing Link—are starting to take shape through Ballard.
It’s hard to decide what part of the process this is, whether it’s a beginning,...