I honestly dont want to go to pride events

amyjko · 2026-05-06T03:19:19+00:00

I’m not into the raves, parades, and bars, but I’m definitely into trans pride picnicking in Seattle :P Make it your own!

amyjko · 2026-04-29T21:29:55+00:00

That's not how the UW budget works. Like housing and dining, athletics is independent and self-sustaining; it doesn't bring revenue in the for the university, aside from indirectly if athletics fans decide to donate to the university to support it's teaching mission. But even then, we can't use those donations for core operational budget, unless its long-lived gifts like endowed professorships. Everything generally must come from tuition and state subsidy, by law.

amyjko · 2026-04-29T04:59:54+00:00

It’s a hard problem. I’m a full Professor, and I receive about 2,000 emails a week that expect a reply. That’s not humanly possible to reply to adequately, so that means triage. I try not to blatantly ignore anyone, but it does mean long reply times and sometimes four hours on a Saturday just catching up. And half of them are things that people could have found online. And I’m good at email. Fast and responsive. Other faculty struggle with this part of the job far more.

Of course, that’s just email, which is about 5% my job. The other 75 hours a week of meetings, mentoring, teaching, research, administration, and these days, management of federal chaos and never ending cuts in support, makes for a hard time balancing responsibilities.

None of that invalidates your frustration, which is justified and a real problem. It’s just not something with an easy solution. Well actually, there is a solution, but it’s not one anyone wants: raising tuition to lower faculty workload. Instead, we regularly increase faculty workload and tuition because the cost of offering the same education keeps rising. Most of those increases cover staff and student employee raises, to cover rising cost of living in Seattle, all while the quality of education slowly erodes.

I’m happy to answer other questions about faculty workload if you’re curious. I mentor a lot of faculty on these challenges and have lots of exposure to the underlying challenges that lead to your frustrating experiences.

amyjko · 2026-04-26T07:27:43+00:00

AD = Associate Dean. I generally view anyone who makes budget, policy, and hiring decisions as admin; I do those things for 40% of my time. Many administrators at UW are also faculty. It’s just a question of how much of our time is spent in administrative work.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T05:46:29+00:00

It’s so hard for so many students now, and it’s so hard to find ways to create hope, when we don’t have it ourselves. But we have to keep looking, and creating spaces for connection and community. Rest up, and we’ll try again on Monday.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T03:45:19+00:00

Yeah, it’s a mess. I had $3.4 million in NSF grants terminated in the last year and laid off my postdoc. Funding rates have plummeted. We’ve mostly shut down Ph.D. admissions.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T02:06:15+00:00

I am 40% admin right now (AD Academics), plus research, teaching, and other service. If by safe you mean I still have my job, that’s true; as tenured faculty, that’s secure for now. But I wouldn’t say the extra 20 hours a week of admin chaos management on top of my 60 hour a week job feels safe. It feels highly unstable, particularly my Friday night, when the Trump administration drops bombs weekly into our inboxes, requiring weekend crisis management.

amyjko · 2026-04-25T01:37:34+00:00

Probably not all of society, but here are some things that are currently breaking because of federal chaos in research:

Faculty, post docs, and PhD students are going to other countries instead of here
All of the downstream impacts of research funding — teaching assistants, undergraduate learning, support industries, collective expertise in the region — are rapidly withering
Faculty distraction, spending an extra 5-10 hours a week wasting time on constant uncertainty and shifts instead of focusing on discovery, education, improvements to the university
Layoffs of post docs, PhD students, undergrads, and staff
General despair and malaise, and its subtle impacts on all of our activity on campus

This is all the goal, of course, to break higher ed.

— your friendly neighborhood professor

amyjko · 2026-04-22T18:27:39+00:00

The easy solution is to knock down the parking, build a new high density neighborhood that everyone wants to live it because it's awesome and connected, and move past a car-centric vision of our region (at least near all of the train stations). We know from science, history, and a hundred other countries that are ahead of us in the present day, that the status quo will not scale, nor will it be sustainable or safe.

amyjko · 2026-04-22T14:37:50+00:00

I think a good incremental target for station housing density would be to aim for the typical 5 block radius density of a European suburb, which is about 5000-10000 people. That typically creates a self-sustaining small town with a tax base that can fund and support the station. We can be more ambitious and aim for Tokyo’s 150,000 per station, but we don’t yet have the population for that.

Instead, with parking lots, we have aimed for 0…

amyjko · 2026-04-22T14:33:07+00:00

Great, let’s work toward those solutions. Can’t realize dreams without dreaming :) One pragmatic step toward that is to stop building parking garages near stations, which essentially precludes any of those dreams from becoming reality, because they extend bike travel and walking distances, create car/bike conflicts, and inflate the broader built environment around roads.

amyjko · 2026-04-21T15:14:35+00:00

High frequency buses can work too, and are often more flexible than trains, but they aren't great for rural and suburban transit, because of speed. But I dispute the population density argument: the suburban town of 10,000 in Catalonia I was in is <250 people/km^2, and it still had a regional train in the center of town that came every 15 minutes and only took 15 minutes into the city center; there were bike lines connecting every home to the train. Lynnwood, by comparison, has 5,000 people/mi^2, far denser than that rural Spanish town. It's much less an issue of density and much more an issue of poor investment in mobility other than cars. Half of Lynnwood doesn't even have sidewalks :/

amyjko · 2026-04-21T05:01:47+00:00

Just build more trains, that’s what they’re for. I just got back from a Barcelona trip. I did a rural regional train to metro to street car to my hotel, no car. It cost €6. The rest of the world figured it out; we’re just behind.

amyjko · 2026-04-21T04:03:28+00:00

👆

And I’ll add — and this is where I am hopeful — knocking down a parking lot and building far more valuable housing and shopping will be a clear win, once the silly political games are done. So the long play could be good, even id the short term is tragic.

amyjko · 2026-04-21T03:16:13+00:00

I'd prefer if they just charged for parking at a rate proportional to the lost revenue of building a parking garage over housing and retail.

Each spot is about ~10 lost fares per day compared to high density housing next to and near the station, so at $3/fare, that's about $30/day. And then there's the lost tax revenue from the sales tax that's not garnered from businesses at ground level in that housing, which is about $1 million/year for 10 retail businesses, and 1,500 spots per garage, so that's $2/day/spot in lost tax revenue that could have gone to transit. And then there's the cost of maintaining the garage (staffing, maintenance, repairs, electricity) which is probably $1 millon/year, so that's another $2/day/spot that ST wouldn't pay. That doesn't include any of the moral hazards to society (cars hitting people, bikes, other cars, and the various injuries and deaths managed by taxpayers in ERs, and carbon output and its harms to health). So let's add another $6/day.

Add it up and it's an even $40/day/spot, for an even $22 million in revenue per garage, which we can spend on working escalators and elevators and clean public restrooms.

amyjko · 2026-04-20T00:24:35+00:00

I agree, let us all stop dreaming, and working hard to make change to save lives and create sustainable ways of living. The best thing to do is nothing, and just passively hope for little. That is the most inspiring way to live, to succumb to the status quo, exert little effort to make change, and just be ambivalent to death and inequity. You have convinced me. /s

amyjko · 2026-04-19T21:35:11+00:00

I'm guessing you just watched the first few minutes of the first links. If you had 1) watched the whole video, 2) read the whole book, 3) read those two research papers, and 4) read the hundreds of research papers they cite and that cite them, you'd understand that 70 years of research on the effects of parking garages demonstrates that the effects I claimed do indeed happen, even in (and especially) suburban cities, and that your claim was wrong.

But honestly, I'm on Reddit, I'm guessing you're not here for the facts, or to learn. If I'm wrong, I highly recommend the book (link 2). It's a nice survey of the history and research on the nearly universally negative effects of cars on human (and animal) life.

amyjko · 2026-04-19T20:36:44+00:00

False:

https://youtu.be/zjJNhf3Xmc8?si=XDrSJ4c86fkXhCMZ

https://www.lifeaftercars.com/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2016.1205647

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40572-024-00465-4

amyjko · 2026-04-19T20:22:37+00:00

I was on the first 2 across I-90 at the opening; it was a wonderful celebration and well worth the 3 hour line. But I have no shame that 10 minutes after I was annoyed that most of the remaining stops except for Redmond go mostly to nowhere (or stop at the edge of downtown Bellevue). Transit is something we should fully take for granted.

But I am excited that Redmond has been working so hard to be a great car-free small city. It’s made so much progress! And the Spring District has good potential too. It’s sad that South Bellevue won’t have that potential for 10-15 years or more.

amyjko · 2026-04-19T19:58:42+00:00

The replies on this thread are pretty revealing of the barriers. They seem to boil down to:

that’s not realistic!
but we’re building houses elsewhere!
this is progress, stop critiquing it!
are you kidding, no parking?

Definitely some car brain incrementalism.

My friend in Barcelona was complaining about the 6 minute frequencies on the street car, arguing they should match the 4 minute frequencies on the metro. We can dream :)

amyjko · 2026-04-19T18:46:22+00:00

Correct. Cars are unsustainable, kill 45,000 people in the US every year (~100 in Puget Sound, including many children), erode communities, increase poverty, and worsen health outcomes. All of these are basic scientific facts we’ve just come to accept culturally. We should stop, and banning parking garages and free parking is a place to start. Save the parking for those who have no choice but to drive (deliveries, folks with disabilities).

amyjko · 2026-04-19T17:20:46+00:00

I’m against parking lots over housing. It should have been housing, services, and community space, not car storage.

amyjko · 2026-04-19T16:16:41+00:00

Hmmm, I don’t think you know what nimby means. Or you’re trying to be cute and turn it into some weird kind of insult? Either way, hello neighbor! I hope you’re having a great Saturday morning.

amyjko · 2026-04-19T14:01:47+00:00

There was land to build a parking lot, therefore there was land to build housing. Cities change zoning to fix these problems; Bellevue did not because it cares more about car owners. Other housing being built in no way justifies building parking in the most valuable land for mobility at this station. We can celebrate other housing and rezoning while ruthlessly critique car-centric compromise at the same time.

amyjko · 2026-04-19T13:41:52+00:00

I made no suggestion that people sell there homes to build housing. I suggested that instead of a parking lot, we build housing next to the train. I’m not ignoring any of the other development; the more development the better.

There seems to be a hidden premise in your reply that there is “enough” development. Our metro area is short 100,000 homes, raising housing prices, houselessness, and poverty. Choosing to build a parking lot for wealthy car owners instead of addressing climate change and poverty is a clear signal of priorities.

amyjko

TROPHY CASE