You only have a few roads to do that east or west of Lake Washington. In most cases, people aren't going to downtown Seattle, downtown Seattle is just in the way.
Then you have things like the air force base or the university. They're important for the economy so you may work at or near them, but for the most part you don't really want to live directly adjacent to them. Fighter jets are very, very loud all day long (my mom lived where you could see the runway right behind her house when I was a teenager), and the military is known to dump very nasty chemicals for their training exercises. University students throw parties, and there's more crime in the area. For a few years, I lived a little over 2 miles from the university, and I had my bike stolen out of my backyard. In the further out part of town where I grew up, that was completely unheard of. Some of the downtown parks are mostly full of homeless adults. The parks where I grew up were mostly full of kids/teenagers.
So there's reasons why you might want to live within a ~30 minute drive of a denser area with services or work, but without having to actually live near a dense area. And your day-to-day services are already spread across most of the city, so you don't need to travel for those. I get the impression that many cities have a similar dynamic.
If I want to buy furniture, I need to go either to the far north or far south of the city to a suburb just outside the city limits (cheaper land).
Culturally, lots of food can only be found in certain areas of the city, which means north/south traveling.
In regards to services overall, obscene land prices means that not much new is being built that isn't owned by large corporations, so we are pretty much stuck with what we have, and what we have is rather quickly disappearing.
> I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).
@sean To reach UW, northgate (well it's demolished just ice skating for now lol), ballard and fremont; granted this is a bit optional, uvillage is nice to visit as well.
Also I find it a bit interesting you have a harder time thinking of interesting stuff in north seattle, I am actually sometimes annoyed having to drive north past downtown seattle to reach north seattle. I didn't really think about it but yeah ikea/southcenter are relatively easy for me to reach. :)
@uoaei Anyways regarding planning itself. Seattle is actually actively planning their next community plan, one of the items called out is whether to allow more 'urban villages' which have shops and other amenities.
For malls, Northgate should have been the north seattle mall but it's currently being redeveloped. There's U village but it's a bit high end. The other alternative of Alderwood mall isn't too bad to get to by driving but during peak traffic can be quite slow.
