Todd's thoughts on Seattle city life

A few days ago I had the displeasure of driving from our apartment in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle to Olympia, Washington. I left about 3:50 and arrived at 6:10. That’s 2 hours and 20 minutes to drive 66 miles. Google Maps estimated it would take about 80 minutes. Hah!

You know what? I was gonna try to explain why traffic in the Seattle area is so bad, but I won’t bother, because it really doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that I-5 is the only practical way to get north and south, and it’s slow at all hours of the day (even, as I later found out, at 1am on a weekday).

The point is that I had lots of time in the car, and that gave me plenty of time to think. More than any place I’ve lived or seen, Seattle’s neighborhoods are pretty self-contained and isolated. People who live in one neighborhood for 10 years sometimes don’t even know what stores or restaurants are in the next neighborhood, which may only be 2 or 3 miles away. When we first started to realize this, I thought it was weird, but then I decided to call it quaint. It’s like how you read life in the middle ages was, where people spent their whole lives in one town and never even left it.

But it wasn’t until my long evening of driving in traffic that I think I figured out why that applies to Seattle. Now I think that so many people live insular lives here for two main reasons. First, the neighborhoods have everything you need. Second, traffic can be so bad that I bet people just prefer to stay local instead of venturing out to as much. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. But I want to talk about the first one – the neighborhoods.

I realized this past week that the Ballard neighborhood is the first place I’ve ever lived where I felt like I could live a real urban lifestyle. There are 3 or 4 grocery stores within easy walking distance, tons of restaurants, 2 health clubs, a few bars, and a movie theater. And thanks to a great bus system, if you can’t find something in Ballard, you can probably find it in the city center and get there in 15 to 20 minutes.

For grins, I decided to compare the “Walk Scores” of the first three locations for our 12 Cities, 1 Year adventure to where we lived in Broomfield.  Here’s how they stack up:

The cost of living is high here, I don’t like that we don’t have reserved parking, our apartment is small and low quality, and there are some seedy folks in the area. But from the standpoint of walkability and convenience, I’d say Seattle is the first city on our trip so far that I could imagine actually living in.