Trolley buses remain financially competitive as a zero-emissions alternative in comparison to battery electric buses (BEBs) for several reasons. I won’t regurgitate the excellent research done by others, but I will link to and summarize it so you have a solid starting point if you ever need ammunition for this argument in your work groups and meetings. 

The three best technical sources I’ve found are this July 2023 report done for MUNI, this Urban Transport Magazine cost comparison of trolley versus battery infrastructure installation, and this January 2025 report done for Poland. Although there’s a lot more in the above links, here are a few points that stood out to me:

• Trolley buses are more energy efficient because they don’t require overnight charging, which requires a massive electricity draw that shouldn’t be underestimated;
• A smaller spare ratio of trolleys is needed as compared with BEBs, because trolleys don’t need to dwell at the base to charge;
• Trolleys have increased energy efficiency because they use electricity only as needed while in operation;
• They’re better for the environment because their batteries are much smaller (less strip-mining for precious metals);
• They’re lighter, and thus result in less wear and tear on roads;
• Trolleys fit the federal definition of fixed-route service, a la rail, and thus qualify for funding that BEBs can’t;
• Trolley infrastructure is already proven, and in place.

King County Metro’s current BEB fleet bears out these observations, particularly in that they’ve historically been unreliable for use on all-day runs. There are also plenty of YouTube videos detailing why trolleys surpass battery vehicles, especially as borne out by data in the last several years. The second half of this video is useful in breaking down some of the electrical engineering problems that may bite us in the future. 

The above points speak for themselves, from the standpoints of both fiscal and environmental responsibility. I’m totally ignoring the additional fact that driving trolleys is just plain more fun. It’s like driving a manual transmission: more challenging, sure, but also more involving, more present, and ultimately more enjoyable; like any sports or art or other craft, trolleys are a skill that feels good to finally master. They ask for more from us, and in turn reveal and concretize more of our abilities, the way playing chess is more fun than playing checkers. 

They also represent a unique asset in defining Seattle’s multimodal dimensions, those linguistically, culturally and civically multitudinous qualities which cause us to be the rare American city that feels about as European as one of our cities can be. History is not often allowed to breathe or show its face in West Coast America, but trolleys carry that quality we feel when we cross the Atlantic or visit the Eastern Seaboard, the tangible reminder that generations existed before we did, and they knew a thing or two we can still learn from. 

The challenge of living in a society focused on short-term gains instead of long-term benefits is that obviously good things are sometimes destroyed at a lasting loss to everyone. We use the term “capitalism” as shorthand for describing this problem, but the best example of this when it comes to trolley buses is Moscow, who recently dismantled their trolley network, formerly the world’s largest, in what today is almost universally recognized as a colossal mistake.

The official reasons given at the time now read as obviously false — they even tried to suggest that diesel fumes would be more environmentally friendly than electrical output! We now know Moscow’s decision had to do with lucrative contracts with BEB manufacturers, redistribution of routes among operating companies, and the erroneous assumption that they’d save electricity. Embarrassingly, the BEB and diesel replacements are now unable to efficiently heat themselves, and demand even more energy consumption than the previous system, which was tried and true since 1933. 

Meanwhile, Budapest and numerous other cities are expanding their trolley bus lines, investing in new overhead and equipment — including, eventually, our own Seattle! These lists do not include other thriving locations, from the massive network in nearby Vancouver, B.C. to far-flung Chelyabinsk, which I’m told has a very good deputy minister of road management and transport, unusual for Russia.

In this Clean Technica article, Michael Barnard writes about Nancy as a useful counterexample to Moscow:

“Similarly, the French city of Nancy offers a cautionary and instructive tale of urban transit innovation. In 2000, Nancy replaced its traditional trolleybuses with an experimental guided-bus system called TVR, which proved unreliable and costly over two decades. After finally scrapping the TVR in 2023, Nancy returned to trolleybus technology, deploying bi-articulated IMC trolleybuses on its busiest urban corridors. This return was not nostalgic but rather pragmatic, leveraging partial re-use of existing overhead wiring while employing off-wire battery operation to maintain aesthetics in the historic city center. Early public feedback in Nancy has been strongly positive, citing improved reliability, comfort, and environmental performance.”

I know BEBs are more politically popular at the moment, but trolleys represent a more stable, proven, efficient, and fiscally responsible choice. Thankfully we don’t have to choose between one or the other, of course, but if we prioritize expanding our trolley network, I think future generations will be thanking us. 

Links & Further Reading:

Reports:

• Climate & Community Institute. The Potential of Trolleybuses: San Francisco Muni Electrification Alternatives Analysis. Summary of trolley advantages, including in-depth technical analysis. By Andrés Díez Restrepo, José Valentín Restrepo, Mauricio Restrepo Restrepo, Lina María Parra Hoyos, Matthew Haugen and Alex Lantsberg. June 2023. 
• Urban Transport Magazine. Bus Electrification: A comparison of capital costs. Detailed financial breakdown of alternate options. By Martin Wright. 2021. 
• Applied Energy by Science Direct. Electrifying the bus network with trolleybus: Analyzing the in motion charging technology. Exploration of IMC, battery cost, battery aging, and the advantage of investing in infrastructure to reduce need for batteries. By Mikołaj Bartłomiejczyk & Priscilla Caliandro. Applied Energy Volume 377, Part C, 1 January 2025.

Articles/Videos

Problems with BEBs vs Trolleys:

• Alan Fisher. The Technology that makes San Francisco’s Transit Superior (video). Exploration of why trolleys surpass alternate choices as the best all-around option, including problems with BEBs. Uses research from the C&C report above, among others. 2025.
• Greater Greater Washington. The DC Circulator’s electrification dilemma. Exploration of “self-inflicted budget woes” in DC transit due to BEBs. By Stephen Coleman Kenny. August 2023.

Trolley expansion internationally:

• Clean Technica. Why Modern Cities Are Embracing Trolleybuses Again. Detailed breakdown of cities expanding their trolley networks, the rationale behind their choices, and with what specific fleet and overhead improvements. By Michael Barnard. 2025.
• Sustainable-Bus.com. Trolleybus: A growing demand thanks to zero emission operations. Details on trolley bus investments/expansions in Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Mexico City, and elsewhere. By SB staff. July 2024.
• Urban Transport Magazine. Moscow: The end of what was once the world’s largest trolleybus operation. Breakdown of what happened, with photographs. By UTM staff. September 2020.
• Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde. Unobvious reasons for trolleybus demolition in Moscow. Observations on what likely took place behind closed doors. By Egor Muleev. January 2021.
• Bus-News. Budapest to Construct New Trolleybus Lines in Józsefváros and Kőbánya. New trolley routes in Budapest! By Tiana May. September 2025.
• Travel and Tour World. Explore More of Budapest: New Trolleybus Routes Enhance Access to Cultural and Historical Sites. How Budapest’s newest trolley expansion will positively impact tourist travel within the city.
• The Urbanist. Metro Plans Trolleybus Investments, with Long Implementation Timelines. Current timeline of trolley infrastructure expansions in Seattle. By Ryan Packer. October 2025. 
• Federal Transit Administration. Fixed Guideway Modernization (5309 (b)(2)). Just for the record: Federal policy confirming trolley bus as qualifying for fixed-route funding. 2016.

Just nerding out:

• I Don’t Know What a Trolley is, Part I & I Don’t Know What a Trolley is, Part II: Wondering what a trolley bus is exactly, or how it works? Check out these two essays by me, which have plenty of pictures of Seattle’s former fleet.
• Trolley Tips: Even if you’re not an operator, you might still be interested in the deets of how these things are driven.
• Chelyabinsk Tram & Trolleybus network. Just giving some pictures to words: images of trolleys in action in that rare part of Russia blessed with a great transport deputy minister. By Yuri Maller. 2008. 
• Russia Beyond. 10 of the best trolleybuses Russia ever designed. This enthusiastic breakdown of some interesting Russian trolley vehicles predates the tragic destruction of Moscow’s robust network. By Boris Egerov. March 2018.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: Remembering Why We Love Trolleys first appeared on The Urbanist.

So when I saw the other side of 5th and Jackson stacked with ambulances, police, a fire truck, and more, I didn’t bother looking over. I concentrated on getting through safely, thankful I was on the side of the street that was still open. At the zone a middle-aged woman boarded who happened to be Black. Her energy seemed receptive to conversation.

I said, “What happened over there?”
“A stabbing,” she replied. “A Samoan guy stabbed a Black guy.”
“Oh no!”
“Wa’n’t his fault though, the Black guy was actin’ up, runnin’ his mouth you know. They be drinkin’ together everyday.”
“Yeah, they’re out there for sure.”
“He ain’t gon’ die though. They stopped the bleeding. He gon’ pull through.”
“That’s good. Stabbing’s no joke!”
“No it ain’t. I got my finger cut off once, uh accident wit’ a fryer, but they got to it in time, they done sewed it up back together, now it work just fine. I can’t feel this part though, right along the edge.”
“That’s scary. That’s beautiful too though.” What did I mean by that?
“I got my legs busted up once too, doctor done told me I wasn’t gon’ walk again–”
“But here you are!”
“Here I am!”
“I’m so glad it worked out that way with your hand, I mean that it wasn’t worse! I’m so glad they got to it in time!”
“Me too. We got to be thankful, always. And loving, not like these fools out here. It’s about love. Gotta love ‘em no matter what they do to us.”
What bold phrasing, I thought. “Ooh, that’s good. Yeah.”
“No matter how they do. Sometime you gotta love ‘em from a distance though!”
“Ha, you got that right! Give ‘em a lil’ bit o’ space!”
“Takin’ care a yoself, but you can still love ‘em.”
“No matter what they do to us, wow,” I said, reflecting. “I so appreciate you for puttin’ it in those words. I need that reminder!”
“‘Cause sometimes you wanna do that other thing.”
“That can be real tempting.”
“But it gots to be love instead, else those cycles of badness don’t never stop.”

You’ve heard love your enemies before, but her phrasing rebirthed the concept as fresh, new, immediate. In her words I heard the acknowledgement of how hard it can be to do, as well as how necessary.

Before, when we were wronged, we were taught to put up with it. Now, we’re taught to speak up. Sometimes, we’re taught to get angry about it. All that is fine, but I’ve noticed on a longer timeline the latter approach doesn’t work for me. And I don’t mean in the euphemistic sense of it not being my preference, but that it doesn’t actually accomplish anything for me. 

I’ve been wronged, as you no doubt have too, in ways that cannot be fixed. But staying angry eventually proves to be little more than a waiting game, and a pointless one at that. On a long enough timeline all angry people would eventually have the thought: Wait a second. Being mad isn’t making me happier. It just perpetuates a lousy mood, which I don’t have time for. While I’m busy stewing how I never deserved this and I hope they burn in hell and so on and so forth, my aggressors have moved on. It’ll be me that gets the ulcer in this scenario, not them. Two things can both be true: a hunger for justice, and the need for sanity.

There’s no one right way to react to being wronged or slighted. If there was, recovery would be a cakewalk. But her way, her nimble, big-hearted, endlessly giving way… I shook my head in admiration and respect. Talk about taking life as it comes and making the best of it. 

I wonder what the wronged man across the street would make of this discussion– not now, not tomorrow, but a year or two from now. Five years. Distance helps.

Somewhere deep inside, our best self knows the words, and the calm that comes with them. I struggle mightily at it, as I imagine that man over there will too, but her outlook was the reminder I needed to hear. It is the sentence I’d like to imagine I know, but am so far from actually embodying.

The harder thing, and the right thing, are often the same.

[For more stories from the road, check out my latest book!]

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: The Harder Thing first appeared on The Urbanist.

Firstly, a second book was always part of the plan. The Lines That Make Us is a very quick read. With only 30 stories, it feels like more of an introduction to the world of the street as I see it. I put my all into it at the time, but… the stories just keep on coming! The street is so dense and rich with incident, so bursting with the multitudinous cacophonies of existence, that sharing another volume from a well that’s so richly supplied was an obvious afterthought.

But through what lens? 

Lines came out in 2018. Much has transpired for us Seattleites since then, as you know. It hasn’t been easy. The disillusionment we thought we felt way back during Amazon’s arrival plus the housing crash seems quaint now. Have you found the hardship of post-2020 existence to possess a seeping quality, a sort of insidious creep, where anxiety has found you not just via the news, on the national and world stage (hardly new), but also in your personal life, new challenges and losses presenting themselves in areas we thought would always be stable? Trauma and its slowpoke sibling, Grief (who has a way of sticking around!), have become so hard to hide from. Even time moves differently: “four years ago” doesn’t feel like four years ago.

What is the way forward through all this morass? 

What if instead of hiding from the above, we lean into the challenge of our times, rising to the occasion, looking out for one another not because it is easy, but precisely because it is hard? Because it’s what our best, toughest, tenderest self would seek to accomplish?

This is what my new book, Deciding To See, is about. Finding hope in the context of community, of strangers. Connecting the dots of the hard times we’ve endured, and realizing they’ve made us stronger, more adept at patience, insight, forgiveness. Love.

Everyone’s currently Working Through Something, because no matter where we are on the ladders of existence we choose to measure ourselves by, we’re all a few rungs lower down than we were before COVID. We’re disillusioned, divided, bewildered by a world larger and more terrifying than we imagined possible. There are many problems today, but I’m most concerned with the problem of being confronted with this many problems. How are we supposed to think, in this environment? 

Conundrums are best met with a solution cut from similar cloth – that is, an emotional problem is best addressed not with logic but with another emotion; an idea is best fought by another idea; and so on. And the problem we face today is not a problem of logic, or emotion, or ideas. It is a problem of perspective. And it is best met with another perspective. 

I avoid being didactic or instructional about this in the book; I don’t have answers, but I have woven the stories in a certain pattern to suggest something that will play slightly differently for every reader, because you’re bringing your own insight to the table too, prismatically adding your unique ray of perception, completing the book, a slightly different experience every time you read it. All my favorite art pieces do this; they don’t tell you what to believe. They just dump a bunch of interesting stuff in your lap and let you decide.

Paul Currington, he of the great Fresh Ground Stories, says that stories come out best when we ‘tell from our scars, not our wounds.’ Sometimes it’s too soon to tell a story. While I don’t feel qualified to write about the traumas most immediately on our minds, I can write about an earlier trauma I went through (being in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks) that I have had time to process, and offer it to the reader as a sort of proxy for reflecting on their own experiences. No one has ever understood something better when they were going through it, as opposed to afterward, with hindsight. I have no hindsight about today’s issues and neither does anyone else. I wanted to write not something that will date quickly (that’s what articles are for, including my own political pieces of the past), but a book that will remain interesting for (we hope!) a long time.

Speaking of politics: there aren’t any, not in this book. This is 300+ pages with no donkeys or elephants. As Paul Currington also says: opinions divide us, but stories bring us together. Life is too rich to reduce into teams. I know people say everything is political, but this book is only that if you want it to be. The stories unavoidably engage various contemporary hot-button topics, but in a way that’s not issue-driven. Storytelling helps us find what we have in common, which will only help when we’re reminded of our differences.

The short version of all this is that the new book is more personal, and more centered around finding hope during hard times. It’s still true stories from the bus (mostly the nighttime Route 7, as ever my favorite), still a celebration of the goodness that lurks within all of us, involving recurring characters and others who are hilarious, heartbreaking, and everything in between; but there’s more of myself this time around. With the themes above, it had to be. We explore moments off the bus, moments before I became a driver, street encounters in other countries, and most of all the interior life of processing tough times while trying to make the best of things, and finding things to celebrate.

So that’s the new book. It’s large. It has almost three times as many stories as Lines. It has heft. Because working out all the above is no joke, especially if you’re an optimist like me! And because I want to give you your money’s worth!

Join for my book event and signing at Elliott Bay Books on Friday May 30th, at 7:00pm. RSVP here. More with me about the book: Seattle Times interview here; NPR interview here.

The post Nathan Vass: The New Book Is Here! first appeared on The Urbanist.

He and I both had the seniority to pick away from Atlantic Base, home of the hardest and most challenging routes; and we both had the seniority to pick away from night work, but for different reasons we wanted to be there, working our night shifts together downtown. I do it because I like the people and the pace; Shawn did it because he needed the money, and overtime is best found on the routes, times, and places that are least desirable.

But the 70 is such a cush route.

It doesn’t even go to 12th and Jackson. It’s too short for sleepers. It’s just the 70. Shawn wasn’t downtown, either. This happened in the U District. And, reading this at home, you might think 3am is a uniquely dangerous time, but it isn’t. In post-Covid Seattle there’s no difference in safety between 3pm and 3am. Both are equally fraught. Remember the new full-time bus driver who, perhaps because he was African, was recently attacked by three men who pulled him off his bus at Third and James and stripped him naked and beat him to a pulp? That happened during afternoon rush hour, broad daylight with tons of people around. 

Our city allows this sort of thing. 

Let the terrible sentence live now as it did then, in that poor operator’s horrific experience. He will never forget those minutes. The same is true for the ten people recently stabbed near 12th and Jackson within a 36-hour period, by one deranged individual who attacked all of his victims unprovoked and mostly from behind. There are good folks up there at that notorious intersection, from the small business owners to the seniors in affordable housing to yes, the youngsters outside struggling with drugs. I happen to really like some of those people. They don’t deserve to be stabbed.

Neither did Shawn. I consider his final moments with the paralysis of intimate sorrow, intimate because I’ve probably driven the very same vehicle was sitting in, and because I know exactly the terrain and timbre of his final time and place. Shawn Yim as he stumbled away from the bus, making it only a short distance before collapsing on the concrete, over there in the alley behind Wells Fargo, a young and healthy 59 year-old dying alone, collapsing not just in loss of blood but also in belief. How could it possibly end this way, so badly and so soon? All the things I’d planned for, hoped for, wanted to do, fix, see, live….

You remember that I was in Paris during the 2015 terror attacks. My next book dives deep into that. But you also remember how decisively Paris, as a system of governance, took action in responding to something even as nebulous as terrorists, taking preventative measures while pursuing the appropriate action behind the scenes, swiftly and with the use of considerable resources. They ensured safety when the enemy was unknown and few. 

Our situation is different. Seattle’s problems and dangers are not hidden but obvious. They repeat in predictable and terrifying ways. Violent behavior happens here without intervention. Life-destroying drugs can be used in broad daylight without consequence. Unstable souls with desperate needs, dangers to themselves and others, are dumped on the street and left to rot amongst the crowd. Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of lip service are expended in the name of solving these crises, while Third Avenue remains exactly as unsafe as it was four years ago.

The fact that it was Shawn Yim crushes me.

A robust and friendly man, one of the few Korean Americans at Atlantic Base besides myself. I rarely brought up our shared heritage but it was always there between us, an unspoken bond the others couldn’t share. We would joke about the miserable state of things, the jesting laughs of our brief interactions emboldening us to carry onward. “I don’t know how you do it, Nate,” he’d smile, watching my enthusiasm as I prepped for another night on my 7.

It happened five minutes into his last trip of his shift.

Home stretch, almost done. He probably took the piece (we call shifts pieces) thinking this’ll be easy, route 70 at night no big deal, nice easy route during the hours when there’s no traffic, even better. What was he saving up for, working all those hours?

The pain of losing Shawn is the fact that I always hoped to know him better. We were both of us continuously in motion, rushing through our lives, aware that we’d get more out of knowing each other but, you know, duty calls. Our friendship was a lifetime of unfinished conversations. Who was he, deep down?

The two of us standing by the microwave, Shawn with his polished wire-frame glasses and trademark light blue oxford–only senior operators wear those, because the uniform store no longer makes them – with a reflective vest on top. His bald head and thoughtful eyes plus the professionalism of the glasses, contrasted with that safety vest, cast him as a sort of urban intellectual, the kind of person you can’t quite pin down, because they don’t fit into any one box.

I always wanted to ask another question, share a little more. He knew my partner, and would joke about how good her Korean is.

“That’s so creepy, you sound like my sister!” he’d tell her, laughing with that handsome, tired smile of his. Other times he’d be driving the bus I was riding, and we’d wax reflectively about human nature and the state of the city.

Of course I wish I could remember our exact conversations. But how can I, sitting as I am in the shell-shocked immensity that is violent death? At least I can still recall the feeling, the easy sensation of another day with one of your favorite coworkers, joking the trip away while watching the road together. He was so good at letting me be myself, even when he had different views. I did the same for him. We never tried to change each other. Talking with him brought me joy.

Why do we delay the things that matter most?

It is the City’s responsibility – our leaders and ourselves – to make Seattle safe. To foster environments where people don’t have to risk damage and death by merely using transit. After all that has happened and continues to happen, who among our leaders would dare to say meaningful progress has been made? My friends on the street and I know differently. We watch and wait as ever we have, waiting for legislation that could so easily reverse a lot of the things Seattleites have to suffer, waiting for someone with the agency and power and courage to come forward and make some real moves. That person will be named a hero.

But whoever they end up being, they will be too late for Shawn Yim.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: Shawn Yim and Keeping Transit Safe first appeared on The Urbanist.

1. Of Laughter and Forgetting

I walked into the base after another rewarding evening on the mighty 7/49. Operator (we’ll call him) Jim was there. I like Jim. I don’t need people to be like me in order for me to enjoy their company, but he and I have a fair amount in common anyway.

“How was your night?”
“Mellow,” Jim replied. “Except kids on my last trip through Union southbound, the trip before I see you, that’s when they always wanna get on and smoke that shit. I went back there and told em, hey –”
“You went back there?”
“Yeah, man!”
“Wow!”
“What, we’re not supposed to?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m not gonna tell you how to drive, but shoot man, I admire your courage.”
“Sometimes you got to! These clowns –”
“Jim, here’s – okay here’s what I worry about. I think to myself what if he has a weapon. What if that’s his friend across the aisle. What if he has five brothers and you’re gonna see him again in an hour.”
“True. Okay. True.”
“But I understand wanting to do something about this stuff.”
“I can’t stand it! I can take everything else. I don’t mind all the other stuff.” He paused, then spoke again. “You know what gets me about it? Is these youngsters don’t care if there’s kids on the bus, or elderly, they don’t care about anyone else.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Exactly! These new kids, ’cause not one of them is from Seattle, and – ” he was nodding vigorously – “you know how beforehand, the whole concept of the street was, the ultimate currency of the street is respect? These kids don’t get that!”
“Yeah! They don’t understand!”
“The street has always been about respect. It’s the whole point of how everything works out here. And now we have all these new people who –”
“– don’t care.” 
“Exactly.” 
“You know, I watch ’em. At Pike. I wanna see how this shit works. Have you seen those puffs of smoke they get? I seen this lady had a piece of foil this big, with a huuuge –”
“No way! She’s gonna overdose in no time!”
“Yeah! I thought the whole idea they smoke on buses is to get outta the wind and get the biggest hit a smoke they can, but they’re gettin’ it out there too! Just a mountain of fumes. You shoulda seen this lady. Like this.”
“She’s gonna be dead in a week!”

2. The Lament

Yes, we were laughing. I dare you to call us insensitive. We, who in the early days of this drug melee saw the rows of dead bodies every pre-dawn morning, laid out on Third between Pike and Union, getting wrapped in body bags and tarps so they could quickly be removed from view before the day’s commuters arrived. We, who are forced to inhale opiates against our will. Who are faced with impossible decisions. Some of us have failed drug tests as a result of being too close to offenders. 

We, who witness crimes we can’t stop, because no one will intervene, no one can stop this. My first experience with fentanyl was a young mother coming up to apologize for her toddler son, who’d vomited on the bus floor due to the fumes coming from the teens smoking right next to them. 

We, who spent a lifetime making sure we didn’t expose our bodies to this garbage, because we wanted to live long and healthy lives with our loved ones. That care, those decisions – are being taken away from us and every passenger who’s done the same. Secondhand smoke of all kinds has lasting effects. Additionally, today’s opiates are the sort which can cause addictive behaviors from a single use, permanent brain damage from a single exposure. Even if some fears are overblown, you have to admit this isn’t kid stuff. Shouldn’t consent be a necessary component of drug abuse? Especially indoors?

We watch as those with real power to change things remain distant, vocal but unmoving. We read with amazement statements from officials which reveal they don’t know the first thing about what goes on out here, in the deep hours of the night (I’m not talking about Metro officials, where there have finally been some positive personnel changes). No, it is not us who are insensitive. It’s the system. The system is a monster, unstoppable and insatiable. 

The pattern was first revealed to the public in 2017: “vagrants” from small and mid-sized cities in the rural Midwest and South are given one-way Greyhound tickets to major West Coast cities. They get dumped in Seattle, where possessing, using and distributing drugs not only won’t land you in any legal trouble, but the goods can be had for dirt cheap. Where ordinances are not enforced, shoplifting and breaking and entering are not prosecuted crimes, and no arrests will be made that don’t involve physical assault. These are mandates I’ve learned about on the street from those with rueful personal experience. Basically: It’s Disneyland. This is the kind of once-a-century lawbreaker’s heaven you’d think would result in the happiest of delinquents. 

3. However

The fact that street people are so uniformly miserable (which wasn’t true pre-pandemic, but is now) is a testament to their humanity. They are not enjoying this melee. It is not fun for them. 

They are hurting. 

They are, like most of us, abandoned by those who profess to look out for them. They are waiting for someone to ask them what they need. Can you believe it has occurred to no elected official to do so? When will those in power learn that solutions are immeasurably better if those affected are involved in the decision-making process? Though it is true that kindness doesn’t always mean giving people what they want, it is usually worthwhile to collaborate, to co-create.

Of course, Seattle’s problems are well beyond the purview of Metro’s responsibility. Metro is merely the setting, the whipping boy and scapegoat who takes on the frankly heroic role of the unwilling venue, while we – operators, commuters, passengers, residents – wait(ing) patiently for a solution. Something needs to be done about the practice of shipping les miserables in from places that don’t want them, and dumping them in cities unprepared to respond. It is not the way to take care of people.

4. Picture Yourself in Others Shoes

You’ve just been relocated to a new city, Seattle. Bigger than anywhere you’ve been. You have no contacts. You don’t know about the Real Change Directory because, why would you, you don’t know where anything is, and it’s obvious the streets are dangerous. You’re out of your element and you know it. They said it would be Amazon and Starbucks. You don’t need a latte; you need a weapon. And you need to figure a lot of stuff out. Where to get meds, where to get a state ID and how, learning what you can and can’t achieve in Seattle based on your past, finding lists for housing, looking up shelters, food, clothes for living, clothes for interviews, a phone, where’s a shower, a dentist for this toothache that’s killing me, how to get insurance, a job, a job, a house, a job, my education records, a prescription renewal, internet, a library card, an address, more food, painkillers maybe, something for this headache, maybe a drink so I don’t feel the cold…

And then, of course, you learn about the drugs. You learn they have that thing they had back home; not as much of it (Seattle isn’t even in the top 20 cities for fentanyl, if you can believe it – see below), but still dirt cheap. And they can’t arrest you over it?

Here’s a description from a former user:

“Think of it this way….think about the most sick you’ve ever been in your life. Think about the cold sweat and chills running down your spine and the dreaded stomach cramps where you know you need to find a bathroom NOW. Now add on being nauseated. Now add on your whole body being sore and achey as if you worked out for 6 hours without stretching. Now add on your skin feeling like it’s going to explode. Now add on some yawning, eye tearing, HIGHLY bad anxiety, restless legs and the knowledge that this is going to last an entire week… or you could just get some Fentanyl and when you do it, allllll the sickness goes away INSTANTLY. It’s an amazing feeling if you’ve ever experienced it. And not only does it go away, your anxiety goes away and is replaced with good feelings. If you could live like that all the time with no consequences, why wouldn’t you? A lot of addicts think it’s worth the risk. I know I did while I was using. Addicts will literally seek it out not caring about whether it’s deadly or not because they need it to survive their day. They need it to not be sick, to stop the withdrawal and to get the high so they can function.”

Why fix your problems when you can just forget them? Why bother with struggling to live when you can die instead? All deaths are suicides, someone once wrote. I disagree, but these deaths make you wonder. The new generation, this rural Gen Z influx, doesn’t currently have the ability to take care of itself. That much is obvious. Seattle has the ability to take care of them, but isn’t.

If you can’t stop a generation from killing itself, you could at least create a safe space where they can do so while you figure out next steps. For nearly a century the city’s most extreme cases resided in the Jungle. With that enormous and largely autonomous facility closed, what was once hidden plays out in broad daylight. What are we to make of a society that allows such behavior? I hear conspiracy theories everyday. Similar to the dog days of 2003, when everyone had a solution to the Iraq war, now everyone has an opinion on what would fix everything, what’s really going on, and why no one’s taking action.

“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” Einstein wrote. What weapons indeed, you ask. How about these: Drugs? The Internet? Manipulation of information? Taking advantage of a country’s most vulnerable people?

This is a picture of the mind racing.

5. The State of Things

“You can get a contact high from fentanyl, you’ll black out,” I was saying to Jim. “I’ve talked with passengers who’ve had that happen to them, just last night this mom from Texas. She didn’t know what hit her. Woke up on the other side of town, had to walk all the way back.”
“It’s sad,” Jim said, in a tone representing both defeat and discovery.
“They’re all new. These kids.”
“Yeah,” he added. “And they don’t hang out with the old guys. Have you ever noticed the guys who drink, and the guys who smoke that shit… never mix?”
“Never! In fact if someone cracks open a beer, I’m honestly relieved because I know for sure, that that guy’s not gonna smoke any fentanyl!” Jim howled in recognition as I continued. “And you know what else? I kinda like having people who smell bad now, because they’ll clear out a coach!”
Jim could barely keep his composure. In between guffaws he said, “You know that, you know that guy who shuffles?”
“I know exactly who you’re talking about!”
“He’s my magic, my little good luck charm!”
“All you have to do is get him on –”
“– and you can ask him to go sit in the back, he doesn’t even get mad, just says okay, and starts going back there, and then – and then –”
“They can’t handle it!”
“They can’t take it!”
“It’s beautiful!”

No, we are not being insensitive. We laugh because laughter is the only tool we have left. When all power has been taken away, there is nothing left to do but make music. Our lives are short, and while civilization crumbles around us – if indeed it is crumbling – I will laugh, smile, share joy, including with those individuals alluded to above, they who are most scorned and feared. 

We can remember that people have different starting points in the game of life, some with less resources than others, and this isn’t their fault. Everyone makes stupid decisions; only some of us have to live out giant chunks of their lives defined by our worst moments. Can you blame them for their hopelessness? Can you blame them for not caring about the rules of a society they feel has rejected them? For flaunting their disregard, the way a child does who feels humiliated, wronged? These are the grapes of wrath. “Kill me please, or else I will,” reads a scrawled plea on a light rail seat.

This is the state of things.

6. How I Live Now

I greet the new boys and girls on the block with the same gusto as ever, and they respond with ignorance or confusion. They’re on edge because they’re on foreign turf, a new city with boundaries and histories they know they’re clueless about. Survival mode. They’re not expecting anything approaching kindness, but I give it to them anyway, without expecting a response… and then it starts to happen. 

It begins.

There is one, then maybe another, not as much as pre-COVID but even still, in these conditions, there are glimmers. You can’t stop humanity, can’t curtail its hunger for connection. “This guy’s cool,” I’ll hear them say. “He actually talks. Actually likes his job, gives a shit about the people.” Eventually they begin to understand you’re not looking down on them. Building relationships with some of the crew at 12th and Jackson has been one of my great post-pandemic joys. 

A young man running out from his hangout spot behind a bus shelter, stepping away from his friends for a moment to pump his first in the air toward me with gratitude, pounding his solar plexus and nodding with a mighty grin, returning my bow and salute. These are the moments I was made for. 

A lovely conversation with two young men that ends with one sheepishly telling me, “I’m sorry if you ever see me, uh you know, passed out on the street or acting out. I’m kinda hooked on that stuff.”
“We all have phases, right?”
He beamed with appreciation. “Exactly.”

Or another, chatting it up with a young man in recovery. He’s on methadone now, and employed, reveling in the de-stressed headspace of clean living. Look at the kindness in his eyes. I know that face. I’ve seen it on others. It is my own face, the child who lives inside the man, still somehow hoping for goodness, sometimes hesitant to believe. Here it is again in a prematurely aged man, likely a veteran of time behind bars, miraculously still in possession of a certain recognizable softness in the eyes. I want to give him a hug.

You realize there are degrees. It isn’t the same level of unstable, or type of usage. Some street people are scared of other street people.

“Sorry ’bout that,” a woman said after her screaming partner stormed off the coach. “I ain’t even with him.”
“Well, I’d rather have you on the bus than him!”
“Ha! Yeah, he’s got his own, uh, problems.”
“Don’t we all. ‘Specially these days.”
“Right. These days is crazy, with them blues…” Blues means fentanyl. “They still overdose every night! Addicts! Dumbasses! I’m a drug addict, but shit…”
“Moderation, right?”
“Right. I don’t smoke that shit. You’d hafta be crazy to go near that stuff.” 
“Totally. Too much… death!”
“Right, all you do is overdose on that bullshit. You take it, then ya die. Simple. People thought heroin was something, pssshhhh, heroin ain’t got nothin’ on this.”

A man behind me, speaking to his ladyfriend as they watch another panoply of incomprehensible behaviors at a bus stop; a fellow outside had desperately yelled for me to wait for him, only to lose interest and start doing handstands. “Man, shit like that is why we get left.” Referring to how often buses pass up zones now. “No wonder!” 

7. New Frontiers

I realize it’s the same game as before, just under harsher circumstances. Street people used to be from Seattle, and they weren’t all on drugs. Now they’re strangers in a strange land, further ostracized by pandemic fears, surrounded by cheap temptation and money they can’t have. But we can still push toward connection. Society’s given up on them, they seem to have given up on themselves, and yet…

Seattle has always been a frontier town. This is a place of beginnings. The recent corporate takeovers have tried their best to conceal it, but no amount of homogenized, artless extravagance can suppress the city’s grit-grime texture, its envelope-pushing origins, the cluttered vibrance and dirty beauty of its enterprising spirit. Cities are living things, with forces of gravity that extend beyond the control of leaders and interests. Frontiers are born in rebellion. They involve strife, violence, unorganized angst that dreams of something greater. These are the ingredients humans have for rebirth. We are failing forward, stumbling together in the night, and it is all pointing in a direction, no more visible to us than to our forebears who lived through worse hardship. Suffering is when we grow, learn, bind ourselves to something higher, and Seattle is currently in labor. 

Am I afraid? Sometimes, yes. Am I saddened and frustrated? Sometimes, yes. I’m saddened when street people assume I hate them, because others do, and act accordingly. I’m frustrated when they default to believing they are unloved, that the world’s against them. They, like the rest of us, see only what they’re looking for, and they accordingly fail to see my smile, fail to hear my words and tone. They were respected and acknowledged for a moment in the night, appreciated by a stranger for their common humanity, and they didn’t have a clue. 

It’s their loss.

I keep on. I do my part. They don’t have to respond. I do this for myself. I do it for the greater good. 

It is a part of me I wish to keep alive.

–

Sources and further reading:
Importing unhoused people:
The Guardian US, 2018: “Bussed Out: How America Moves Its Homeless.” Online Journalism Awards.

Seattle’s problems less severe than other cities:
American Addiction Centers, 2023: “Highest Drug Use by City.” Primarily midwest cities; breakdowns by drug type.
American Addiction Centers, 2023: “Top 10 US States with Drug Overdose Deaths.” West Virginia sits at #1. Data and context for each state.
Monarch Shores Recovery: “10 Cities with Worst Drug Problems.” With info for each city.
Families Against Fentanyl: “Fentanyl By State: Report.” A data compilation primarily using 2021 CDC data.
CDC: “Drug Overdose Mortality by State.”

On policy:
ChangingTheNarrative, 2023. “The Tired Narratives of Drug Policy.” Clarification of stigmatizing/reductive language regarding addiction and policing issues; however, not Seattle-specific (in practical terms, dealing and possessing are not illegal here.)
ChangeWA, 2020: “A Loophole that Effectively Legalizes Most Crime in Seattle.” Analysis of Seattle City Council action to excuse and dismiss most misdemeanor crimes.
Seattle City Attorney: “Seattle Isn’t Dying.” Alternate opinion to above.
KUOW, 2022: “Why is Seattle dropping 2,000 misdemeanor cases?” Explanation of the backlog and choice.

Drug impacts on the body:
CDC: “Health Problems Caused by Secondhand Smoke.”
Johns Hopkins University, 2023. “Opioid Use Disorder.” On addictive behaviors and impacts.
American Addiction Centers, 2022: “Opiates, Overdose and Permanent Brain Damage.” Brief explanation of hypoxic brain damage.
NIH, 2020: “Fentanyl panic goes viral: The spread of misinformation about overdose risk from casual contact with fentanyl in mainstream and social media.” Analysis of various comments, their impacts, and degree of foundation in fact.
WhiteHouse.gov: “Fentanyl: Safety Recommendations for First Responders” (PDF). Unlike operators, first responders primarily encounter fentanyl in solid form.

The international perspective
DEA, 2020: “Fentanyl Flow to the United States.” Executive Summary, Unclassified Document (PDF).
The Guardian, 2023: “The China-Mexico fentanyl pipeline: increasingly sophisticated and deadly.” Brief overview of business models.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: State of the (Seattle) Union first appeared on The Urbanist.

I can still see fairly well without my glasses, but I can’t make out faces at a distance. I stepped onto the light rail after a full evening of driving, surveying the interior; in the late night hours you have to do that. I didn’t think I needed glasses anymore tonight, living in the antisocial city of Seattle as I do… but wait, I was forgetting that my Seattle isn’t antisocial. It’s vivacious and welcoming. I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear enthusiastic voices.

I. Matt

“Hey, is that your buddy?” someone asked someone else.
“Heyyyy!” said the other, standing to face me.
I could recognize him now. What was his name? It’d been a while. “Is it… Matt?”
“Man, you’re good! What’s up, you just gettin’ offa work?”
“Yup, just got done doin’ some E line. How ‘bout you?”

He was the same person who’d scramble onto my 7 and spend the entire ride carefully putting on lipstick and eyeliner. That takes courage, especially in the excessively heteronormative space the 7 can sometimes be. But Matt is Matt, fully, scruffy and effeminate no matter who’s around, and there’s something impressive about his committed enthusiasm and confidence of self. I never saw any of the neighborhood brothers bother him. Tonight he shared about his day with characteristic fast-talking speed, the words tumbling over each other as he mentioned an Issaquah-Sammamish bike ride, “then went south to see a friend now my buddy and I we’re on our way home.”

I nodded at the other man, a considerably shier fellow slightly younger than me.

“Issaquah, that seems like a nice place to ride bike,” I said.
“Yeah, but…” Matt paused. “It’s their world, you know? All those rich folks out there.”
“I know what you mean. Didn’t used to be like that.” I spent much of my childhood on the Eastside, and could relate. The image of the old Bellevue Square flashed in my mind– a welcoming space of brick and green trim and natural light, the kind of middle-class suburban haunt you went to during adolescence. Now it’s an impenetrable fortress of glass and gleaming marble, no longer Orange Julius and World Wrapps but Ben Bridge and Burberry. Those of us who remember the old Eastside can still find our special corners, the hidden parks and open lots, hints of a time before the suburbs became so class-specific. Matt would’ve liked the old mall.

“They’re doin’ it even out there now though,” he was saying. “The pills.”
I was incredulous. “On the Eastside?!”
“Yeah and then on the train earlier we saw like fifty pieces of foil all over. It’s bad, dude,” he said, breathlessly. “I was talkin’ to this cop outside my house, I live on the bottom floor and I have a window and right outside the window in the alley there’s guys there doin’ the, you know, and I was like ‘if they’re in the alley can I ask them to leave.’ He said it’s better just to tell him. Don’t want ‘em to…”
I understood. “Right you don’t wanna antagonize them, and then they know you live there. Are there bars on the window?”
“Naw, but it’s, the panes are too small for a person to squeeze–”
“Okay good good–”
“Yeah they’d have to be really desperate!”
“That’s the thing now,” I said. “You used to be able to talk to anybody. But if they’re, if all they’re thinking about is getting a fix, you can’t talk to them, can’t reason with them.”
“Right. Their brain has no room for anything else.”

II. David

I looked over, noticing a commotion by the nearest train doors at Westlake. A familiar Dostoyevskyan figure was trying to get on. In June 2013 I described him as “an underweight man in the massive black jacket, with rotting teeth and dirty fingers,“ a description still accurate tonight. I say points for consistency! He thrust his cane forcefully into the train doors to get them to reopen.

“This guy’s cool,” Matt said to me, reassuringly.
“Yeah, I know him. One of the twins!” After the fellow had made it onboard, to the chagrin of everyone around, I called out happily to him. “Heyy! David or Daniel?”
“David!”

They’re identical twins, but David’s always had it a little more together. He uses a cane now. I can barely understand him, but we’re fluent in the language of smiles, having grinned at each other for over a decade. Matt and his partner left us at Capitol Hill and I went over to David, grabbing the seat pair in front of his. I tend to run into more of my friends in the last train car, but it’s also often the dirtiest. I gestured at the floor around us, which was swamped in a viscous pink and brown liquid I had to laugh at as stepped around.

“What happened here?”
“It wasn’t me, I just got here!”
“Ha! I know.”
“I no see you on 7 for long time.”
“I’m doing the E Line now, every night! I’m gonna get back to that 7 though. I miss it.”

He said something unintelligible, I think pertaining to how the streets have changed. Something about 12th and Jackson, the telltale Target shopping bags and blue pills changing hands. That’s the subject of conversation nowadays among us street denizens; I mostly know old-timers, and fentanyl is by and large a young person’s game. The new crowd on the street may be obsessed with it, but the time has come for that generational divide which always comes, where the older set can’t believe the new drugs the kids are into. “I thought I was gettin’ high,” a mid-aged man told me one night, incredulous at the amazing foolishness of his youthful compatriots. It wasn’t always the case that street people were repelled by other street people. A voice across the aisle spoke up in agreement to David’s musings and my last comment.

III. Tommy

“That E Line is da worst fuckin’ bus route of all da buses in this whole city. Every single one they fighting, they putting needles in theyselves, they something goin’ on in da back. I no take that route unless I absolutely have to.”

Like Matt and David, he was in his forties, and as uniquely himself as they. Whereas Matt marched to his own drumbeat no matter who was around, and David was an ebullient propulsive force with an enthusiasm not even canes, train doors or a decade of street living could diminish, this new fellow had the discerning eyes of a thinker. You got the impression he did a lot more observing than speaking; a lonesome face that hadn’t always frowned, with a lot on his mind and not enough people to share it with. His accent and deep olive skin hailed from warmer climes, and the scissor-cut of his salt-and-pepper beard told you, along with the angular lines of his prematurely aging face, that this was a state he’d grown accustomed to surviving, and that there had been other, different states before.

David left us at the next station, and I continued listening to this third fellow. I couldn’t argue with him. I’ve had a different experience of the E myself, but only slightly. I think I get away with a lot of good graces by respecting people. That helps you 90 times out of a 100, but there are still those remaining ten times where, as anyone alive long enough will tell you, the world explodes on you no matter who you are. He changed out his sock for a fresh one and expounded.

“Dey beat each udder up, dey shoot themselves up and drop their needle, drop their foil, and there are decent people around!”
“Exactly!” I said. “Old-timers, kids, sitting right next to them!”
“And nobody do nothing. At McDonalds Third and Pike they do this with their hands on the wall, [unintelligible] red meat, dealing, shooting, and cops on the other side don’t do nutting! Dey know what’s goin’ on. You try to tell them what’s goin’ on and they, they just–”
“‘Oh, we can’t do anything–'”
“Exactly! They blame it on someone else. Always it’s someone else. No responsibility. So: who is it who is responsible for what is going on the streets?”
“I don’t even know, man. I can’t, as a driver I cannot call for help, because they won’t come!”
“I know,” he said ruefully (more on that can of worms here). “No one does any-ting, for real.” His accent and greying beard combined to suggest wisdom, some Central American prophet deep in the mountains. He also had a habit of avoiding eye contact, as though he had access to some vague and distant dimension I could only imagine. “Dey can’t arrest me ’cause I only speak da truth. People just walk past, or dey sit there, broad day-light–” he spaced out the syllables of the phrase– “like nothing is wrong, looking at their phone. I’m like are they crazy? Do they see what is happening right next to them? Do they see anyting, any reality good or bad?”
“They only see their phone! Or their earbuds, like this. Totally closed off.”
“Totally.”
“They used to talk!” Our voices rose in fervor and enthusiasm. He was looking at me now.
“For real!” he exclaimed. “I would walk through Pike Place at the park by the water up above and say to the families, the people walking around, ‘look! It’s a beautiful day! Look at the sunshine!’ And they don’t say nutting. Dey pretend I’m not even there. Now, I don’t say anyting because they all think I’m crazy. Like da world has turned into some new planet where nobody talks to nobody anymore. Sometimes I think to myself am I da one who’s crazy, cause I feel like I be the only one.”

IV. Togetherness

I was grinning. We both were, alive to each other’s solitude, finally able to share. He was a waterfall held back, and now the floodgates were opening. Do you know the freedom of finding one of your own, at long last?

I said, “no man, it’s not you. They used to talk to people! Now, it’s totally different.”
“Totally different.”
“They’re better at talking to computers than they are at talking to people.”
“Ha! Yes!”
“And I don’t think they’re happier! You look at them, how they look at their phones… they don’t look happy! They look depressed!”
“They are depressed!” he exclaimed. “You can tell! It’s easy to tell!”
“I’m like have they forgotten, it feels good to talk? It feels good to look around? Okay there’ll be a sunset, everything very beautiful the sky the clouds you know–“
“Uh huh.”
“–and they’re all looking down like this!”
“Hahahahaha!”
“They don’t even notice!!”

We were screaming. We were by far the loudest people on the bus. Two men in the back of the last car, straddle-sitting over what was probably a pile of melted ice cream, roar-laughing in joyful communion… and no one gave any sign of noticing.

“Ever since this coronavirus everyone has become so scared,” he said. “They block out the world, they block out people. They do phones, they do drugs, whatever.”
I heard the sentence and heard it again, doing a mental double-take. He’d put it together in a way I hadn’t. I’d never thought to associate the two before. But of course. “It’s all addiction,” I said by way of paraphrase, sitting in new understanding. “It’s all the same.” I could hear an echo, a line from one my favorite films: “no one cares about reality anymore.”
He said, “they all turn away.”

We went on like that because we had to. We needed to burst out laughing, to name the absurdity of new urban living, because no one else would. And yet in that absurdity, I found myself recoiling from the sensation of deriding these others. It is not for me to judge the age we find ourselves in. What’s wrong with retreating, hiding, being safe, being wary and careful?

In my own way I do those things too. I lack the resilience to scroll through news of our globe’s atrocities. I also turn away, but in the opposite direction: I take refuge in the present. In the prismatic glow of sunset light reflected between our skyscrapers. In the precision dexterity of piloting a trolley bus through a switch. The small realities, the ones we can reach out and feel. In the flash-hot silence of a recognized soul, the glimmering echo of a stranger’s eyes. Can you feel it? It was there, in between Matt’s glitter-punk eyeliner. It was there, in David’s ease with me, his comfort in being around someone who respects him.

I saw it too in this man’s eyes, a personality caught between condemnation and laughter, encouraged now by our togetherness. We were rebelling mightily against the pandemic-reborn ethos of “every (wo)man for himself,” because it was our nature to do so. Yes, that makes me outcast from the norm, a better fit socially with these misfit old-timers than everyone else on this train. But being the best version of yourself usually involves going against the crowd, and often– necessarily– means being lonely.

But who cares? That was always true. Who cares, when it also means the connections you do make will resonate that much more? When you’re at peace with your own company, the one person who won’t let you down? Because I was who I was, I was talking to him, and versa vice. I could hardly want it any other way.

“Thank you,” he said. “It makes me feel good I’m not the only one. I am happy we had this conversation ‘cause I was worried! Like I am the only person in the world who feels this way and there is something terrible wrong with me!”
“Naw man, it’s two of us at least! What’s your name?”
“I was just going to ask you. I’m Tommy from Jamaica.”
“Tommy from Jamaica, I’m Nathan. I’ll see you around.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too!”

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: The Old-Timers first appeared on The Urbanist.

“Nathaniel!” Marlon called out from midway back on my E Line.
“Heyyy,” I replied. Must be someone I’ve chatted with in the past.
“When you get up to 100th, can you hug the curb real tight so I can kick these boxes out?”
“Hug the curb at 100th, yeah sounds good!”

As Marlon stepped out I called out, as I often do, “stay safe!”

After I did so I heard an echo from the back of the bus, speaking the words in exactly the same tone I had: “stay safe!”

I figured it was a youngster mocking me. Youngsters do that sometimes. As I’d just told two prostitutes about an hour earlier: “you can’t control what other people say about you.” The ladies were telling me about how “one of our own was talking shit about us to the other guys.” The three of us had agreed that you simply can’t control if others make fun of you, what slander they come up with, how they may try to smear your character… but you can control how you respond. You can control your character. If they want to play nice and talk, that’s another thing, but otherwise… “If you just keep doin’ you,” I’d said, “nevermind what they say, eventually people will realize what’s true and what isn’t. Holdin’ your head high, right?”

So I ignored the boy in the back. It had to have been him who’d spoken; he was also talking to himself, half-singing and half-talking, energetically gesticulating to the empty back lounge. He had on a standard-issue university alum sweatshirt and beanie, no hood, curly hair like me and a similar complexion, and pajama pants. A dozen blocks later he began walking forcefully toward me while we were stopped at a zone, not jumping out the back door, not going out the middle, continuing up to me, closer– this is when bus drivers always take a deep breath, preparing for the worst–

Which is when he said, breathlessly, “hey man I just really love how you roll I just wanted to come hang out with talk to you for a second while I ride into town, bro.”
I couldn’t hide my enthusiastic surprise. “Yeah man, absolutely! How’s it going?”
“It’s been pretty dope, just riding around in my scooter all day I’m new in Seattle just checking out everything looking around, it’s really cool!”
“Aw sweet, welcome to Seattle! Where you comin’ from?”
“Phoenix Arizona.”
“I’m from LA–”
“Oh that’s hella cool, but also like hella crazy, ‘cause every bus driver I’ve met so far has been from LA.”
“That’s so wild!”
He said, “what do you like about Seattle?”

I thought for a moment as I looked at the Amazon towers far in the distance. This city used to be so easy to praise. I said, “the fresh air.”
“Me too. I’m going downtown because it seems like a hella lit place to ride your scooter around at night, man! I just don’t like the drug use, though. Hey I hear there’s this new thing called fentanyl, they’re smoking it on buses.”
“Yeah,” I sighed, “it happens sometimes.”
“What is fentanyl?”
“It’s… it’s kind of like morphine, except it’s way more intense. It’s so– get this, it’s so potent that two milligrams is enough to kill an average-size person. No joke.”
“Daaayumn.”
“Yeah and two milligrams is like four grains of salt.”
“Oh wow that’s really crazy.”
“Yeah it’s super intense, and it’s really easy to OD on. It’s so easy to OD on. And it makes me sad because fentanyl is mostly used by younger people, right–”
“Right–”
“–and I’m like that’s my generation, man! It’s not good!”
“Yeah I don’t do that. I don’t like drugs. I just smoke cigarettes, which I know they’re bad for you too.”
“Well. It’s not the worst vice.”
“For sure I just do it for stress.” We were discussing the worst news in the city and he remained unflappably himself. Isn’t this the ultimate skill? To remember the muscle of joy, of goodness, through thick and thin? In a tone of exultant curiosity he said, “hey so there’s a couple questions I always ask bus drivers ‘cause I wanted to be a bus driver I just turned twenty-three–”
“Oh cool! I started when I was twenty-one–”
“Really?” he continued, in his apparently customary breathless excitement. It was contagious. “Awesome I always ask bus drivers what do they like most about driving a bus and so far they’ve always every one has said they like giving people a good safe ride so people can get where they’re going.”
“That’s really cool to hear that’s what they say. For me I like helping people. It makes me feel good, you know? Like talking to them, helping, connecting helping them feel connected, like they belong and stuff.”
“Yeah you give a really chill ride. Hella smooth, bro. like I was back there just chilling out.”
“Yeah I try to keep it really smooth.”
“Yeah I’m never gonna report you!”

Every time I announced an upcoming zone over the microphone, he’d exclaim, “niiiice!” He looked out at the Aurora Bridge with such enthusiastic verve the landscape had to work to keep up. “Yeah I love Seattle,” he breathed. “I just don’t like all the drugs though.”
“Yeah me neither. And the thing is it hasn’t always been like this. Fentanyl’s super new. It’s only been around a few months now.” This was last winter.
“Yeah three four months–“
“It’d be cool if it wasn’t around too long.”
“That’d be hella awesome. I love riding around on my scooter and looking at all the people who have jobs working. It’s just crazy to think each of them did all the stuff you gotta do to get ready and apply and get a job and keep a job. I rap and I ride my scooter. I just got this house, man, it’s just me and my girl for now but I wanna find people who wanna just come live with us for free you know, ‘cause I got a PS4 I think and a PS5 and hella video games, and it’d be cool to just find some people who’d wanna live with us without paying anything and just hang out together with me and my girl, you know?”
“Oh you’re not gonna have any problem finding people who wanna come live with you for free and play video games!”

He was finagling his scooter now, trying to get it through the front door to deboard while also stepping over it. An older man was outside waiting to enter and after a few seconds of waiting began to curse the boy out. “Goddamn shit! Come on!”

While I can’t say our youngster didn’t notice the man berating him, I can unequivocally say that it didn’t have the slightest impact on his psyche.
“Right on,” he said in amiable distraction as he scooted out.
The man’s hate was an inconsequential puff of smoke, an almost pathetic attempt that had nothing on our friend’s breezy goodness. He was riding a wave of his own making. Already flying away on his scooter now, there he is, singing, waving his arm in some way that makes sense to him, gestures for an audience of one as the stars and clouds smiled from up on high. He looked up at them as he rode and somehow didn’t fall down.

Keep doin’ you, I said to myself.

—

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: Doin’ You first appeared on The Urbanist.

In addition to writing, Nathan is a photographer, filmmaker, and artist. His photography has been featured in festivals and galleries in the Seattle area and accompany many of his essays. It’s this artistic eye which turns his vignettes of Seattle from essays into an affectionate and truthful portrait of the city. His work on actual film informs his perspective and requires a level of thoughtfulness that doesn’t often show up in digital mediums. It strongly parallels the deliberation and thoughtfulness that it takes to connect with people in the “mobile living room” he steers around town.

You can listen to Ray’s conversation with Nathan on The Urbanist Podcast, available here or through your favorite podcast streaming service. And pick up the book from Elliott Bay Book Company, available here.

Register for a Zoom link and suggest a question via this Google Form. We look forward to seeing you on April 4 at 6pm.

The post The Urbanist Book Club: The Lines That Make Us by Nathan Vass first appeared on The Urbanist.

But this guy wasn’t budging.The odd thing about it was that he looked awake. I spoke into the microphone again. “Alright my buddy, it’s our last stop here. Thank you so much.”

No reaction. He simply looked up at me, but not with the evil eye; his was the neutral eye, altogether more beguiling. After a long enough span of time, nothing is more terrifying than a blank expression. I sauntered back, swigging from my glass Perrier bottle. I carry it not as a weapon but as a noisemaker, and have found it essential for waking people up. I was about to speak again when he preempted me.

“How you doing, my brother!”

My friend! I exclaimed inwardly. He was no stranger but a familiar face from the 7, smelling much better than he once did. “Hey, maaan,” I said excitedly.

He reached up for a fistpound, stretching in his seat. Don’t you wake up slowly too?

“It’s good to see you,” I continued. “Long time!”

He was middle-aged rugged, with a few gold teeth, but not in the gangster sense of things; he was too friendly, too present to those around him. Look at his inquisitive, wide-alive eyes and the defined jaw, like an African Brad Pitt with five o’clock (make that nine-o’clock) stubble. Perhaps at a loss for how to express his gratitude, he suddenly said with amiable force, “I’ll clean the bus for you!”

I knew I couldn’t stop him. Reader, if you can believe it, this has happened more than once. A passenger will be so appreciative of my treatment of the people, my enthusiasm for them, that they’ll manifest an energy of thankfulness they hardly know what to do with. In looking around at the ubiquitously filthy E Line interior, they’ll declare something along the lines of, “you deserve better than this. Here, gimme one second, I’ll take care of it for you!” For myself I don’t at all mind the squalid innards of my chosen routes, but I’ve discovered you can’t stop such a gesture. It would be like refusing a meal from those countries where the sharing of food is an almost holy act. I laughed with gratitude and said, “aw, you don’t have to do that!”

He replied loudly, “I heard your voice,” pointing to the microphone speakers, as though that quite naturally explained his janitorial enthusiasm now. “I knew it was you!”

I was moved, because last year’s stint on the E Line was such an impersonal experience for me. They all scurry on and off through the back doors, and you have no opportunity to establish community, to create a safe space (more here on why Rainier RapidRide isn’t the best idea). It’s why I’ve since returned to the 7, despite my love for the Aurora Avenue corridor going all the way back to my 358 days.

“You’re the best driver,” he was saying. “Better than all these motherf*ckers. Even the Africans!” He meant it companionably, as in: even more than my own people!

“Nooo. Thank you.”

“You are the best one!”

What can I say to such things? Of course I’m not the best one. But again, you can’t refuse a meal. “That’s an honor. I’m honored, man. Thank you.” Then I added by some way of explanation, “I try to respect everyone.”

“We can tell!” He practically brayed the line, so deep was his elation. “You think people don’t recognize you, way up there.” Wagging his finger, with a singsong grin you couldn’t resist: “Weee recognize you!”

His name was Biniyam. He and I stepped off together just as the security crew at Aurora Village came walking over, asking if they could help me. I love having those guys at various terminals now, but tonight I didn’t need them.

“Actually, that turned out to just be an old buddy saying hey!”

They were as pleasantly surprised as I was. A week or two later in the same place, I saw another E Line parked with all its doors open. I could see the driver was having trouble getting someone off the bus, and walked over.

“Hey, do you need help waking somebody up…” I said as I entered, and, turning, recognized Biniyam. He began beaming, and changed his tune completely. But of course: he was no longer being yelled at, but smiled at. Sometimes it’s all about the soft approach (more tips on sleepers here). We pounded fists yet again as he said: “if you ask me to get up, I get up!”

We walked out together again, waving at the relieved and entirely nonplussed operator. Biniyam exclaimed to me, “I love you man! You love the people!”

I resisted the praise, as I always do, and focused instead on congratulating his resilient spirit. If these guys out here are able to be happy, to find respite in life’s momentary joys, I have no excuse.

—

Not long after I would be helping David (whom I meet for the first time here) get settled in his wheelchair at northbound 85th. As we cruised up Aurora, he suddenly blared out in his customarily stentorian voice, “Yo, Nathan.”

“Hey!”

“You know what makes the world go round?”

“Tell me!”

“It ain’t love, bro.”

I had a reply of my own, but kept silent because I wanted hear his answer. I grinned when he voiced the very same word that was on my mind.

“It’s RESPECT.”

He roared the term like the monolith it was. The word was a landing. He hovered in between the end of the first syllable and the start of the second, the “–SP–,” carefully holding the size of it, gifting the forceful second syllable the power of an airplane’s wheels on touchdown. ReSPect. He enunciated the final consonants like they were critical to the term, a denouement of sorts, a jet wing’s trailing edge flaps deflecting downward, the comforting proof that you have made it home. He said the word, and the word was good. In life at large I continue to suspect that love is the answer, but in the world of The Street, in David’s world and mine, he was right.

It’s Respect.

It was respect that made the moment between Biniyam and I, sauntering up and out of the bus, exchanging a fistpound, his gold smile glittering under high black and grey clouds as he stalked off into another north end night. We carry such moments with us, or at least I do. They buoy me up when I’m alone. They remind me amidst all the hardship going on, of the good things I cannot forget are also true.

Thank you, World.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: The Glue That Holds Us Together first appeared on The Urbanist.

I prefer to ride in the last train car but couldn’t tonight, as it reeked of fentanyl. Little did I know this would be something I would later be thankful for. I scurried onto one of the center cars and stood in the middle section, the area with the seats that face each other. Why did I stand there? I never go in that area. The doors closed and we were on our way, already bombing into the next station. At this late hour only a small crowd was forming.

He walked slowly by me without recognizing me, taking a seat to my immediate right. What was his name again? I can never remember. A congenial face who’s ridden my bus not a few times, and better known by other people in my life who speak better French. My French is abysmal, so I remained silent, too embarrassed to speak up.

He’s a mid-aged man, handsome in a Clooney sort of way. Trim and sharp as so many Frenchmen are, tonight wearing fitted jeans and coat with a scarf, and shoes you looked at a second time because you were trying to resolve whether they were duotone leather dress shoes or sneakers, because they really seemed to be both.

He said to the college-age woman seated across from him, “I like your scarf.” A gentle, quiet accent.
“Thank you,” she replied with enthusiasm. “I like your scarf! We both have yellow!”
“Yours is golden.”
She had the youthful exuberance that welcomed such comments, perhaps especially when they came from an amiable and French version of George Clooney. You could perceive she hadn’t yet been soured by poor experiences, did not yet have the instinct to turn from the world, to be wary and cautious, distrustful. She was excited by the prospect of living.

Do you remember what that’s like?

I seek to preserve that belief, that sight for goodness, despite the times I’ve been burned. I assume good in others. I believe they are telling the truth, that maybe they are giving and trusting and kind, because I am. I am gullible, and you will ask, has this gotten me in trouble? Have I been burned by these traits?

Worse than you can possibly imagine. But I endeavor not to let those experiences define me. Are they not fewer in number, for all of us? The tendencies within me listed above are also those which allow me to experience all the highs of my life, all the countless joys with strangers recounted in the pages of this blog and my book. “Do you really want to live your whole life distrusting other people?” historian Rutger Bregman asks. “That price is way too high to pay. I think it’s more rational to say, OK, this is just going to happen a couple of times in my life that I’ll be the victim of some confidence game. And if you’ve never been conned, then maybe you should ask yourself the question: Is my basic attitude to life trusting enough?”

It’s a good sign, not a bad one, if you’ve been taken advantage of here and there. It means you’re getting the good stuff too. Like this woman, who was beaming from the stranger interaction in a way none of the other youngsters buried in their headphones and smartphones could know. I look to such souls for inspiration, in the ongoing question of how to remain open, fragile, raw, while also taking care of myself.

A silence passed. Then Monsieur Clooney commented to three young friends seated off to the side, nearby, all unrelated to the scarf-clad woman: “I like your earrings, all of you.”
As they thanked him with smiles he added, “everybody, so well-dressed tonight!”

At this point I simply had to turn and say hi. “Bonsoir, monsieur!”
He recognized me instantly. “Aaahh! Bonsoir, mon ami! Comment ça va?”
“Ça va bien, et vous?”
“Tres bien. Où vas-tu ce soir? Résidence, travail?”
“Au cinéma!”
“Au cinéma, bon! Quel film?”
“Un film français: Petite maman.”
“Quel?”
“Petite maman. Un film… de Celine Sciamma.”
“Ah oui, Sciamma.”
At this point he lost me with his reply, and I said with a smile the one French line I can repeat with ease: “Je sais seulement un peu de français!” And despite his protestations I insisted on my clumsiness, adding, “un petit peu!”

We put together with a smattering of both languages that I was off to see the new Celine Sciamma film on my own, and had earlier that evening seen Jacques Audiard’s Les Olympiades (English title: Paris, 13th District). He knew both directors and we jointly marvelled particularly at Audiard’s prodigious talent across a range of genres. The hushed and respectful awe that crept into his voice on the mention of Audiard immediately revealed how thoroughly he knew the man’s work… I was flushed with delight. I don’t get to talk cinema with people nearly enough. Out of gladness I asked how he was doing generally, and decided to give a truthful answer to his reply of the same.

“I’m… okay. These days are, you know.”
He smiled in rueful agreement, asking, “what is a struggle for you? Which one?”
“Well, personal stuff is hardest for me. If my personal life is going well, then I have the strength to not be bothered by everything else. But if it’s going poorly, then I see everything as… you know how if three things go badly, people think everything is going badly? But it’s really just three things? I am trying not to do that.”
“Yes, I agree. I keep my personal life very simple.” After I assented to the wisdom of that approach he added, “there is a parallel in math. Simplicity as an emergent quality.”
“Really?” I asked, thinking it over. “The reduction of things… as a growth?”
“Well, yes. The cancellation of complexity. It allows for…”

As we continued on, I could feel the woman across from us leaning in, listening with fascination. I flashed her a smile and wanted to bring her in on the conversation. Spaces like this should feel like campfires.

I said, “Okay, I just have to say I think your shoes are super cool. I noticed them as soon as you sat down.” She smiled wider. “They’re very striking. And I like the… the pleasant contrast with your slacks, it’s a cool contrast.” They were striking; matte black platform shoes with thick rubber soles, which raised her at least four inches, likely more with the elevated heel. Not my style, but definitely hers!
“Oh thank you! It’s my first time wearing them out, so that’s good to hear.”
Monsieur Clooney: “How do they feel?”
“Really good! I can see over people, which has never been my experience!”
Clooney, who is tall, quipped, “you can see at my level!”
She laughed. “Exactly! I think they’ll be good for going to concerts and raves, they fit well for dancing, and I’ll be able to see the stage. For once!”
I said, “It’s good to be able to see the see the stage!”
He nodded, saying, “yes, I like the clash with your pants. It’s good.”
She thanked him and asked what we were up to tonight, and I mentioned I was going to see a film. “It’s called Petite maman, by the director of, did you ever see Portrait of a Lady on Fire?”
“I don’t think I know that one.” She spoke the line not dismissively but eagerly, her wide eyes and clear voice wanting more. Not all young people are so intrigued by new worlds. But how do you describe the sublimity that is Portrait de la jeune fille en feu in a few words on a subway?
“It’s about two women… a painter and a subject, and they form a bond. It’s kind of magical. Really beautiful.” Clooney was nodding. “You should check it out.”
“I’ll look for it! Is it in French?”
“Yeah, but there’s subtitles,” I said. “I’d be lost without them!”
“Hey, you know more than me. I know Spanish and English, but not French–“
At this point Clooney said, fluently, “eso es muy bueno, poder hablar español–” to which I exclaimed in delight, “you’re amazing, oh my goodness! Both of you! My Korean and English are both better than my Spanish and French, I barely know anything, but you, both of you–”
She said, “well that’s great too!”
Westlake Station came all too soon. “Thank you. I’ll leave you two here. Have a great night!”
“Enjoy the movie!”
“Bonne nuit!”
“You too! Bonne nuit!”

And with that I dashed out the train doors, just in time. There was no exchange of numbers nor other information. That’s not why we were here. You don’t talk to strangers to make friends. You already have friends. We speak to the person next to us for the reminder that we belong to something larger. Not just a friend group, not merely a family, but the vast interconnected cosmos of humanity at large, the great urban experiment as success rather than failure. Do you know how good that feels? How deep down that sense of community bolsters us, the knowledge that we all share life and light, and we make more of it when we reach out to each other?

I document the details of this quotidian exchange because these are the moments life are made of. Despite my short time here, I can already state what you probably also know: it will not be the momentous, climactic high points which stick in your memory. It will be run-ins like these, the small moments of pause in our hectic lives when we made each other glow. The three of us became beautiful, easy smiles bouncing off the energy we threw around for one another. We felt larger, filling the outline of our best selves, accepted by others different in age and temperament, able to find a common language of existence.

He was a thinker, someone alive to his surroundings who considered his words before speaking them; she was buoyant, open to the world instead of shut off from it, receptive to joys besides the ones she knew; intrigued by our conversation and eager to offer light. I like to imagine the two of them talking long after I left them. They will likely never see each other again, and I am equally unlikely to run into either (though I have had a knack for randomly encountering the Frenchman). What sticks with me are their qualities. That is what I did walk away with, and what galvanizes me. Their conversation inspires, raises me up with the reminder that things like this still happen–even today, in our antisocial, withdrawn, interior, suspicious, isolationist times.

This happens too.

Happy New Year.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: This Happens Too first appeared on The Urbanist.