I’ve got some good news! I recently started a role doing some planning consulting up in Seattle with BERK Consulting (and you can read my work bio here!). It’s a small firm (about 30 people) and we do the full gamut of planning work for projects in Washington State. I’m in a relatively familiar role as a data/maps guy, and it’s gone really well so far. I’m still planning on writing about whatever strikes my fancy here, but unfortunately my strong bursts of writing energy have been a bit less strong lately. Working full-time will do that I guess.

Obviously starting a new job after two years of grad school is tiring, but what’s really gotten me is how overextended I’ve been on the weekends. Did I need to do a backpacking trip, followed by helping Connor move to Idaho, followed by a trip to Lake Tahoe all in the first three weeks of a new job in a city I don’t currently live in? Probably not, but that’s the way things worked out. And all of those trips were lovely too, so it feels a bit wrong to complain about them.

Anyways, I wanted to post about this partially to give myself a pat on the back, but also to provide a bit of commentary on returning to the workforce in a field I’ve spent the better part of the last three years endlessly pondering.

Doing Work I Like is Weird

My first though on the new job is that it’s very weird to care about the work I’m doing. I had a bit of this when I did research during grad school, but for reasons I won’t get into here, that faded pretty quickly (and most of my interest was focused on class and project work anyways). I think the last time I recall looking forward to going to work was back when I was a swim coach. Yes, it’s still work and it can be a grind, but it’s very refreshing to be with a firm that does work I am actually interested in, instead of helping with automate the most boring financial reports known to man, or modeling how best to harass people with student loans for payments.

I guess that’s what going to grad school was all about, but I’ll admit it’s been a bit of an adjustment after spending months grinding job applications. I think I had internalized the idea that I may never get a job in planning, and that I should just work at the co-op instead. Still, the adjustment has been real, and I imagine my wacky once a week Seattle-Portland commute plays a big role there.

About That Commute…

And yes, my job is in person in Seattle, but I’m writing this from Portland¹. I’m managing this okay so far (it’s only been a few weeks after all), and having friends to sublet from (shout out to Lain and Erin!) makes things manageable. Yes, they do live in Issaquah, so it makes the Seattle commute a bit spicy, but more on that later. No, right now I’m taking Amtrak up once a week on Sunday and coming back down to Portland on Wednesday after work. It’s a lot of travel, but in typical me fashion I’m enjoying it well enough. I always have been fond of a wacky commute.

For one, if the American Community Survey decides to randomly sample me (a legitimate dream of mine), I can be one of the few people living in Portland who can rightly choose “Long-distance train or commuter rail” as their mode of transportation to work in Table B08006. The fact that 1,625 people chose that answer, along with the 2,053 choosing “subway or elevated rail” in the Portland MSA makes me skeptical that the general public cares about the differentiation between transit rail modes – as well all know that the Portland MSA’s only bonfide commuter rail service is the WES, whose anemic ridership of ~200 daily riders makes one question the veracity of the ACS numbers².

Incidentally, I’m not the only real “long-distance train or commuter rail” commuter in the area, as I have chatted with multiple people on the train who either have a similar situation, or have had one in the past. There’s your market research for the demand for a high speed rail line. People make it work for a train that takes 3 hours and 25 minutes and is subject to the occasional huge delay, surely they’d like a higher speed service at least.

So for now, it’s an interesting novelty, but a full time move to Seattle is on the horizon. It’s a bridge to cross when I get to it, but it’s a bridge that’s coming. But I’ll have more thoughts on that later.

And About that Issaquah Commute…

Of course, my wacky commuting doesn’t end with a once a week trip to Seattle. It also is inclusive of a daily grind from Issaquah to my office in South Lake Union. It’s about 20 miles, so I’ve been mixing it up between a ride in on the extensive buses operated by King County Metro and Sound Transit and a one-way bike in, with a bus on the way back. I use the word “extensive” loosely here, but the Sound Transit 554³ (with very comfy seats!) makes the Seattle-Issaquah run 46 times a day, and the King County Metro 218 adds an additional five non-stop trips from my nearest park and ride (Issaquah Highlands). 51 buses a day on a suburban bus route is no joke, and despite Issaquah being essentially at the eastern edge of the Seattle metroplex, the ride in on the express 218 only takes a bit over 30 minutes.

Despite these quick bus commute options, I’ve vastly preferred to ride my bike in. Factoring in the 10 to 15 minute walk to the bus stop, the padding you give yourself for a bus that doesn’t come super frequently, and the walk to the office from the bus stop on the other end, and it’s only about 20 minutes slower for me to ride the 20 miles in. If I’m riding hard anyways.

And while I’ve always been one to favor a masochistic bike commute (who can forget my days of riding on this road in suburban Nashville to get to my first job out of school?), this one has been surprisingly tame. It’s on a more or less contiguous bike trail, and it features some scenery which is still quite novel to me. Sure, the trail is called the I-90 trail and isn’t exactly a quiet ride through the bucolic hills of South Central Wisconsin, but it beats a long ride in on roads shared with Seattle drivers.

The views of Lake Washington over the I-90 bridge, the steep green hills, and the pleasant little path are definitely offset by the existential horror of 15 straight miles of suburban sprawl, but when you’re on a nice bike ride it seems more charming than oppressive. You know, a charming existential horror.

Being in the “Belly of the Beast”

Once I get to work (in South Lake Union), I’m always greeted by the sights and sounds of Seattle traffic. There’s no shortage of aggressive drivers, most of which seem to be in a Tesla, but what I’ve been fixated on more is the endless lines of coach buses for tech workers. I’ve been surprised by how little information or reporting on these I can find that are Seattle-specific, but they are everywhere. And on routes that I know for a fact are directly served by King County Metro and Sound Transit. There are a few exceptions⁴, but when I see a coach bus that requires a badge to ride serving the downtown-Capitol Hill route, I always think to myself “haven’t these people heard of the Link 1 Line”? Sure, Westlake station is a whole nine minute walk from the heart of it all (the Spheres), but it’s also a train underground that goes one stop and takes two minutes.

I find it disarming to interact with this kind of thing. A bunch of people who I see on the streets every day clearly agree that driving a car into downtown Seattle is foolish at best, but choose a shuttle run by their employer over riding a (potentially better) service with the public. It just reeks of elitism to me, and I’m curious to learn more about them, but frustratingly little of their operations are public knowledge⁵.

I’ve always known that Seattle is essentially the heart of the global tech scene outside of San Francisco, but it’s weird to be in the midst of it. At a time in my life where I yearn more every day for the sweet release of a flip phone, being in proximity to the headquarters of a company working day and night to develop products I hate, that I feel are actively making the world a worse place is somewhere between weird and terrifying. I’ve spent a lot of time in Seattle, but so little in the belly of the beast that I thought maybe the ridiculous rent and the general air of resentment were just part of the charm, rather than direct reactions to a stratified local economic situation. But now we’ve ventured pretty far from the “oooh I got a job” realm.

I’m sure in the days, months, and years to come I’ll have varying opinions about my job, especially the relationship between institutions and social change, and the role private sector policy/consulting work plays in that. But for now, I’m feeling content to enjoy learning a ton of new professional skills while learning a ton about a new place.

Thanks for reading, ’til next time.

Footnotes

1. I’m actually writing this from Issaquah right now, but I started writing it in Portland ↩︎
2. Which you can review at your leisure here. It’s funny to see this kind of mode-level discrepancy come up in other places too. Like the 1,200 Chicagoans who claim to commute to work on light rail, despite the nearest “proper” light rail system being Detroit or Minneapolis. ↩︎
3. I will have many, many, many thoughts on Sound Transit as my time in Seattle progresses, but for now I am deeply satisfied with the span of service on the 554. The final bus of the day leaves after midnight (!) from Downtown Seattle. ↩︎
4. I’ve seen headsigns for SLU -> Snoqualamie, which is a cool 2 hours by transit at 4 PM on a weekday, which like fair, but also do we need Amazon workers living in Snoqualamie? Not for me to decide, but I hope they support the Northwest Railway Museum with all that money they get paid. ↩︎
5. Microsoft’s timetables used to be public, and are archived here. I’ll write something up about this service eventually, but Amazon is completely opaque from what I’ve seen. ↩︎