Living in Seattle at the moment is both weird and a bit scary. Scary because the Washington State Department of Transportation is currently ramping up to a major shutdown of a portion of Interstate 5 just south of downtown Seattle for major repair work between the 10th and 29th of this month. This is being billed as one of their biggest projects ever. Weird because, the way I look at it, it’s sort of a traffic armageddon, but it’s also a major opportunity for the City of Seattle that’s being grossly neglected.

Businesses are responding by trying to make it far easier for employees to get to work by offering telecommute or shared commute options, even promoting use of transit via our local transit agencies (Metro, Sound, and Pierce Transit, specifically). Metro, rather glaringly, doesn’t have any extra capacity to add in case it gets slammed, while other agencies seem to have some surplus. But this is truly strange in that, despite exhortations from the Department of Transportation to avoid commuting through that particular stretch of I-5, nobody seems to see this as a prime opportunity to rethink the way that Seattle itself is organized.

We have a number of major traffic arterials that are slowly aging and will be in desperate need of replacement within the next 20 years. One of the biggest is the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which is way over capacity; another is the Highway 520 floating bridge, and Interstate 5 ranks high in that list. Political fisticuffs have been flying around the subject of replacing both the Viaduct and the floating bridge, with people arguing quite vocally about construction methods and timeline. These are vital infrastructure – or so we think. I can’t argue that the floating bridge doesn’t provide a major west/east corridor – of course it does. But what if we sat down and re-visioned the idea of Seattle and the communities surrounding it? What if we decided that, instead of expending our mental energy and our physical resources on reconstructing these resources, we increase population density in Seattle’s downtown core, massively improve transit presence throughout Seattle, and offer disincentives to drive downtown (imitating London and cities in Germany)?

The problem is, we sit around debating. Some of the most drastic rethinking of what it means to be in a city comes from politicians that take immediate action without allowing time for debate. Yes, Interstate 5 is being repaired, and it will undoubtedly be a mess. So why are we ignoring the chance to rethink what it means to live here rather than simply saying “things will get worse, deal with it”? Why do we push this off until the Viaduct closes and we are faced with much the same problem?

It seems like people miss the point entirely when they worry that companies selling bottled water don’t make it clear where that water comes from. The problem isn’t really the source – the problem is that they’re selling bottled water in the first place. There’s a huge difference between water bottles that are typically bought and used once and, say, my trusty Nalgene bottle that follows me all over the place and always has fresh water in it.

Not that I’m not guilty of buying bottled items – I do occasionally indulge in a Nantucket Nectar or two, which are sold in glass, not plastic, bottles. I’ve also been known to make a hapless coffee cup go on a nice, long journey to the landfill. But there’s something about bottled water that just seems somewhat redundant. The fact that it puts tons of plastic into the waste stream is a very large drawback, but the fact that major brands may simply be purifying municipal water sources and shipping it elsewhere has its own set of problems – the energy used in bottling and transportation alone greatly outweigh just drinking from the tap in the first place. You can always get a water purification system, though these systems are problems in and of themselves.

Update (August 1, 2007): The New York Times makes a slightly stronger case on this issue than I do.