A visit to Europe to put Kitsap County's planning policies into perspective

My family spent the holidays in Germany visiting friends, and I walked away with a familiar thought: “Why can’t we have nice things like this?”

Sure, we visited some of those postcard-type touristy places - Cologne and Bonn in Germany, Strasbourg in France - but for the most part we were staying with our friends near Wiesbaden, a town of about 278,000 near Frankfurt in western Germany. It was an experience of ordinary German life. I’ll try to give a balanced account, because Europe isn’t perfect.

We took trains… but we also loaded up minivans with five kids (aged 4-16) and took a road trip on the Autobahn.

We dined out… but we also went to the grocery store.

We went to Germany’s famed Christmas markets… but we also spent time at playgrounds.

The weather and climate were remarkably similar to western Washington’s: chilly and drizzly.

These are places with cars, groceries, ambulances, children, rain, new housing, and furniture that needs to be moved… in short, all the weird excuses I hear American pessimists using to make our cities worse.

But here’s the thing: Even with all that, German cities are objectively better than American cities. They’re less stressful, more human, more beautiful.

You can drive when it’s convenient, just like you can in America… but you can also walk, bike, and take the bus or train when it’s convenient. Germany has chosen to make those options convenient.

We took the train to Cologne and Bonn, because the train made the most sense for that trip. But to go to Strasbourg, we drove the Autobahn to the border, parked, and took light rail into the picturesque medieval city. You can drive to the grocery store and fill up your trunk, but the store parking lot won’t be five times the footprint of the actual store. It will have enough parking, but not excessive parking.

Different transit modes made sense for different trips, and it was easy to mix and match. It wasn’t that there were no cars - it’s that we truly had options in a way that we don’t in America.

We also experienced some of the recent problems of Deutsche Bahn, the German train system. Two of five trains ran late, leaving us standing on the platform longer than we would have liked. Our kids ran around and played as we waited. They got snacks at the vending machine. It was better than being bumper-to-bumper with a kid melting down in the backseat.

I didn’t know what to expect from Wiesbaden going into this trip. It isn’t really an international tourist destination. We were there to visit friends; I just hoped the town was decent.

It exceeded my expectations. We walked 45 minutes from our friends’ apartment into Wiesbaden, and it was a lovely walk along a greenway. Families were out and about, teenagers were mucking around, young lovers were holding hands - our commute was filled with humanity, not machines. It was filled with greenery instead of asphalt.

Downtown, we were greeted by monumental churches, patio cafes, and cobblestone squares, one of which was temporarily converted into an ice skating rink, ringed by stately municipal architecture. Children were enchanted by the Christmas markets’ lights, trees, ferris wheels, and stalls selling various treats and trinkets. There was a festive, communal feeling in the air as crowds of happy locals strolled between each square’s market.

The food was hearty. The Kölsch and Glühwein were tasty. The currywurst? Okay, the currywurst was kind of weird in my opinion. Be curry or be wurst, but don’t be currywurst.

Curried ketchup notwithstanding, it was an indulgent, family-friendly atmosphere. Nothing was missing from this place, yet I couldn’t help but notice how trim everyone was. I mean, people were eating sausages, schnitzel, beer, and pastries galore, and still looking fit. On average, Germans live four years longer than Americans do. I suspect walking and biking to their calories has something to do with it.

While Wiesbaden is a nice place, it isn’t particularly unique. One morning, I walked into the small village of Bierstadt, an inauspicious burg of about 12,000 with no monumental architecture. It was kind of dumpy, actually. No glitz. No glamor.

Still, its churches were framed by plazas and parks. Its streets were narrow and calm. It had focal points, gathering points. There were no building setbacks from the sidewalk, and minimal off-street parking. The cityscape wasn’t stretched horizontally to accommodate cars, allowing you to hit multiple bakeries within a 10 minute walk.

Bierstadt was a mix of single-family homes, small apartments, and live-work units (shop below, apartment above). I don’t think a single building was more than three stories tall. Its density and proportions felt cozy, but not crowded. I stumbled upon a jewelry store down one back alley - a total American zoning taboo! Taboo or not, it seemed to be employing people.

Buses crisscrossed the village, pulling into stops where LED boards let well-dressed professionals know when their bus was arriving. Germany has invested in making public transit reliable, cost-effective, and convenient enough to compete with private car travel, and a wider variety of people use it more as a result.

Conversely, if you drive, you are required by law to maintain your car, and if you run out of gas on the Autobahn you get fined. Breaking down is a public safety hazard.

Personal responsibility is really stressed in the German legal system. I saw several playgrounds where, instead of an actual slide, there were just two poles angled into the ground - definitely more fun, definitely more likely to break an arm. But it reflects a German attitude: if you hurt yourself on someone else’s property, you can’t sue that person for your own actions. If you can’t handle the weird German death-slide, then don’t go on it - and if you can’t use your car responsibly, use an alternative. This works better when there actually are alternatives.

Bonn was exceptionally beautiful. Bonn’s historic center had that trademark German gingerbread-house feel, both wholesome and grand at the same time. Its blocks consisted of six story buildings, in varying styles, often no more than 30 feet wide. Each sliver had its own personality, while the tall, narrow proportions felt human. Ultra-modern steel and glass apartments contrasted with neoclassical neighbors - a diversity American municipalities and lenders both discourage.

You feel the layers of history in great European cities. They’re built incrementally, not built to a finished state all at once by a corporation’s master hand. Incrementalism is a gamble. It means things change and sensibilities might be offended - but it also recognizes that cities evolve, and there’s no such thing as ever being “finished.” Some German structures are downright ugly - but in a busy cityscape, they’re easily overlooked. And as it turns out, ugly structures can still house people. I saw almost no visible homelessness in Germany.

These cities have invested in beauty, prioritizing exceptional public spaces. Parks, plazas, and playgrounds abound, and streets themselves are pleasant places to promenade. Cities yielded quickly to farms and wildernesses with minimal sprawl.

Germany made me reconsider what “collectivism” and “individualism” actually mean. If you were to live in one of those top-tier German cities, you would likely share walls, trains, and parks - but at the same time, you would have far more real options for how you lived, traveled, and recreated than you do in America. You would have choices.

It’s weird. I get the sense that Germans simultaneously value collectivism and personal responsibility more than we do.

It’s no small difference. You see it in Kitsap’s most Europhilic city, Poulsbo, where code privileges European aesthetics but bans everything substantive that makes European cities what they are. The result? Cookie-cutter subdivisions with the cutest little decorative gables you’ve ever seen. You’ll pay over $500k for a starter home there, to be near Poulsbo’s charming downtown - which is also banned under Poulsbo city code. Poulsbo is now tightening its belt to afford the lifestyle it’s become accustomed to while simultaneously outlawing its greatest asset.

Aping the European aesthetic doesn’t cut it. You can’t slap some scalloped shingles on a spec home and call it hygge. It’s lipstick on a pig. The underlying form and philosophy matters. I’d prefer a Pacific Northwest aesthetic expression of timeless urban forms.

Poulsbo has done admirably with preserving natural spaces and creating bike and pedestrian connections - but its timid land use is uninspired. Some townhomes and corner cafes might do it good.

I’ve seen the same basic values in Turkey, Colombia, and Spain: humanity, variety, and beauty are built into the world’s cities. Somehow, most of the world has figured out how to have nice things.

So why can’t we? Why are American cities so uniquely terrible in comparison?

I think it all comes down to an attitude of pessimism.

If Bremerton copied Barcelona’s policies word-for-word, the pessimist imagines dystopian bedlam, but never Barcelona. Then they’ll pay handsomely to visit Barcelona.

There seems to be a bias that beautiful, human-centered cities are extravagances because they require investment. Nice things are, supposedly, impractical luxuries - unlike all those government-sponsored single-family subdivisions, personal climate-controlled transportation machines, freeway overpasses, and free parking.

The pessimist wants to invest exclusively in getting as quickly as possible from private space to private space. Convenience and control are king - but somehow they’re never considered a luxury. I think it’s because, on the surface, the infrastructure of convenience is quite ugly.

If it’s ugly it must be a good value, and if it’s beautiful it must be excessive and impractical, right?

I don’t buy it. People pay big to go to the great cities of the world, to live and do business there. Sprawl is far more expensive, with more infrastructure per unit. How did anyone ever convince us that nice things don’t pay off?

Pessimism - in government and in personal life - is a function of insecurity. Pessimism is safe. You never fail if you never try. You never look foolish if you never believe anything. While I appreciate sober-minded fiscal sense, blind pessimism is not the same thing as fiscal sense. It is possible to be both pessimistic and stupid.

What if it actually pays off to create beautiful, human-centered places? There’s a saying these naysayers use that I’m actually quite fond of: “Government should be run like a business.”

I agree.

But I think the naysayers want to model local governments after Spirit Airlines, whereas I’d like local governments to be run more like Apple. You know. Innovate. Invest in making a great “product,” knowing that not all spending is created equal. The question is: Are we spending on investments that actually pay off?

It isn’t just that the product of the last 70 years is ugly, it’s that we’re in crisis because of it. Housing costs, traffic, CO2 emissions, and homelessness all seem to be spiraling out of control - and it’s no mystery why. Exclusionary zoning is doing exactly what it was intended to. We’ve heavily subsidized ugly luxuries instead of people. We seem to have no trouble housing cars, but we pretend housing people is too complex and expensive.

Bremerton seems to be outgrowing its pessimists. It's made tremendous strides in recent years - but sometimes it just feels like there’s too much ground left to cover. It seems like the most modest proposals face irrational backlash, then become bogged down in years of studies and committees (6th Street has been studied to death for 17 years). The pace of change has been frustrating.

2024 is perhaps the year we can change that. After NIMBYs have run housing into the ground, Washington HB 1110 is forcing cities like Bremerton to relax their housing regulations - and that is triggering a revision of Bremerton’s Comprehensive Plan.

It coincides with the Joint Compatibility Transportation Plan (JCTP), a multi-year analysis of the Gorst bottleneck and shipyard parking in an effort to improve NBK/PSNS access. The JCTP presented Bremerton with an ultimatum: will we invest in shoving more cars through Bremerton’s streets and adding parking in residential neighborhoods? Or is Bremerton going to focus on livability and attract shipyard workers to transit modes that scale better? Sidewalks and bike lanes are the cheapest, most durable way to move people there is.

Mercifully, Bremerton’s city council opted for their constituents’ livability - but will this philosophy be put into practice? I don’t know if Bremerton has ever elected a more pro-pedestrian, pro-livability city council. Bremerton’s voters seem ready for change, and their city council seems up to the task - which is good, because changing the Comprehensive Plan presents an opportunity to rapidly reform our defunct system. We need to remove parking minimums. We need to regulate building form instead of function. We need density, diversity, and public beauty. Visit www.Bremerton2044.com before February 15 to give input.

Also in response to the JCTP, Kitsap Transit expressed an interest in shifting from park-and-rides to transit-oriented developments. Bravo! Maybe they can give prospective developers in Illahee and North Kitsap a call.

In Illahee, a developer wants to develop a waterfront swath of forest into another subdivision. In North Kitsap, Raydient is proposing a sports complex/YMCA/housing development on Bond. These are car-dependent proposals that will increase traffic and erode public access to nature - but I think with some tweaks, developers could make their money while creating enduring legacies.

Instead of turning every forest into private property in a subdivision, can we encourage villages wrapped around a public gathering space, surrounded by public wilderness? Can we ask for a built environment that encourages interaction and reflection, while offering solid bus and bike connections?

On the subject of transit, Jefferson Transit is now fare-free, meaning you can take a bus from Poulsbo or Kingston to Port Townsend for free. Could Kitsap Transit learn from this? Only about 5.3% of KT’s operations budget comes from fares. Why not treat public transit like an investment in reducing traffic and getting people to jobs? Similar reforms in Kansas City, Boston, and Tuscon have been promising.

I take heart from history. I’ve been reading about the city of Izmir during the Tanzimat (“Reform”) period of the Ottoman Empire lately, and I’m amazed by the ability of a generation of Turks, educated in Europe, to rapidly modernize and reform their systems. They faced a more calcified, nostalgic old guard than we do, but they made Izmir an enduring, cosmopolitan powerhouse of culture and commerce.

Let’s not forget that American cities once rivaled European cities in beauty, with extensive streetcar networks and public gathering places. Great cities are part of our tradition, too. Beginning with the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, we spent over $650 billion in today’s dollars to bulldoze and divide our cities with freeways. Parking minimums and exclusionary zoning followed. Our problems were caused by a period of drastic reform and public investment. Solutions require the same basic formula - though likely less extreme.

It’s time to believe. Let the great Kitsap reform begin.

Kevin Walthall is a former Kitsap Sun columnist. He lives in Poulsbo.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Looking at Kitsap County vision for the future of cities and transit