By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, the city released a 22-page transportation levy renewal proposal that would bring in $1.3 billion to fund roads, bridges, and sidewalks over the next eight years, with $218 million for bridge maintenance, $109 million for sidewalks and pedestrian improvements, and $107 million on Vision Zero and school safety projects.
Adjusted for inflation and timeline (the new levy is eight years instead of nine), that’s about $33 more million a year than the Move Seattle levy that’s about to expire—hardly enough to maintain the status quo, much less invest in new initiatives, especially once construction cost inflation is factored in.
After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the levy last week, advocates for safer streets began pointing out inconsistencies between the city’s rhetoric about the proposal—which Harrell said “will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected” no matter how people get around—and what the levy would actually fund.
Although the graphics-heavy proposal is noticeably light on specifics, the balance of spending categories skews heavily toward car-oriented projects, including road repairs, new pavement “on our busiest streets,” and bridge maintenance, including upgrades and planning for the replacement of the Ballard and Magnolia Bridges.
Compared to the Move Seattle Levy, the new levy plan cuts spending on transit connections by 30 percent; cuts pedestrian projects, including new sidewalks, by 23 percent; and cuts spending on freight mobility by 45 percent, according to an analysis by Whose Streets? Our Streets! organizer Ethan Campbell. Spending on “climate and resiliency” projects is up 111 percent from the previous levy, but that category—as described in the levy proposal—focuses mostly on planting trees, expanding access to EV chargers, and increasing “low-emissions goods delivery in areas most impacted by climate change and pollution,” rather than shifting people away from cars. Vehicles account for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse-gas emissions in Seattle.
Advocates for safer streets say the levy also represents a capitulation on the city’s Vision Zero goal of reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030, which is within the timeline of the eight-year levy. In Seattle, as in many cities, traffic deaths—particularly pedestrian deaths—have been trending upward over the past several years, as the Seattle Department of Transportation acknowledged in its “Vision Zero Top-To-Bottom Review” last year.
“Seattle adopted Vision Zero … in 2015, and yet over 1,500 people have been seriously injured and over 200 have been killed since then,” Erica Bush, director of Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, said on Monday, at a press conference held by a coalition of advocates outside City Hall. “We will not see this trend change until we commit to completely reimagining the way we use our roadways.”
At the Monday press conference, safety advocates pushed for a levy of at least $1.7 billion, with at least half of the funding dedicated to street safety and mobility for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, noted that broken and missing sidewalks often force people who use wheelchairs, scooters, and walkers to “navigate the streets alongside cars,” putting their lives at risk.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The levy proposes adding just 250 blocks of sidewalks and sidewalk alternatives, like curbless paved “walkways,” over eight years—about 2 percent of the 11,000 blocks that currently lack sidewalks. At that rate, advocates said, it will take the city at least 400 years to complete its sidewalk network. “In the same proposal that cuts pedestrian infrastructure, it also set an ambitious goal of filling every pothole in 72 hours,” Black said. “[The] transportation system that the mayor is proposing [is] one where we measure our response times to infrastructure for cars in hours, and our response to infrastructure for pedestrians in centuries.”
During a meeting of the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee Tuesday night, members raised questions about how the levy will advance the city’s Vision Zero goals. “Why don’t we have an outcome [in the levy proposal] that says ‘reduce deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030’?” committee member Inga Manskopf asked. “And quite frankly, if that’s not an outcome of this levy, then why are we still calling it Vision Zero?”
SDOT downtown mobility deputy director Meghan Shepard responded that the goals of Vision Zero are embedded in every aspect of the plan, from traffic signal timing upgrades to leading pedestrian signals to street repaving.
“Not having a goal [in the plan] doesn’t mean it’s not still a goal,” Shepard said. “This [plan] is really to articulate how this funding will support a pivot in the way that we’re implementing [Vision Zero].” Noting that the city has “pivoted” to the USDOT’s “safe system” approach, which involves creating multiple layers of protection to prevent deaths and serious injuries, Shepard said the city recognized “that the trend was heading in the wrong direction.”
Without the level of detail included in earlier levies, though, it’s hard to tell exactly what kind of pivot the levy “articulates.” For example, the plan says the levy will fund “safety projects on 12 or more corridors in the High Injury Network” to advance the city’s Vision Zero goals, but doesn’t say what kind of “safety projects” those will be, which “corridors,” or what it means to fund a project along a corridor, which could mean anything from a new crosswalk signal to miles of substantive improvements. (Confusingly, the one page the proposal dedicates to “Vision Zero and School Safety” includes nine “corridors” as “candidate projects” for all Vision Zero and school safety projects).
The Move Seattle levy proposal, in contrast, included a detailed project list, along with maps showing where these projects would be located throughout the city. This year’s plan, in contrast, includes just two maps of “candidate projects” and no project list. In an interview with PubliCola, SDOT deputy director Francisca Stefan said the city learned during the last levy cycle that unanticipated events—like COVID and the closure of the West Seattle Bridge—can lead to disappointment if the city promises specific projects and can’t deliver. “Candidate projects,” she said, is a way of saying “we intend to do those projects. … That’s the starting package, and changes may occur.”
Stefan said she’s “really optimistic” that the levy will result in progress toward Vision Zero. In addition to the “pivot” to safe systems, Stefan noted that the city recently elevated its chief traffic engineer, Venu Nemani, to the position of chief safety officer, “so he has both authority and accountability for safety.” Stefan added that the city has already started making lower-cost but high-impact changes—prohibiting right turns on red at high-traffic intersections, for example, and “hardening” center lanes to stop drivers from making illegal left turns or plowing into pedestrians in crosswalks.
“What I’m really excited about is the way in which, now that the team and those funds are positioned within the traffic engineering function, we can effectively and quickly scale up these” changes, Stefan said. “They’re tested, we know they work. And while we were doing them before, the Vision Zero team had to do a lift every time they wanted to do one of these things.”
Polling by the mayor’s office revealed that voters would have approved a $1.7 billion levy—the highest level tested—but Harrell opted to go for a status-quo renewal, prompting many advocates to question why (and push for a more ambitious plan). Responding to those questions on Tuesday, SDOT’s Shepard said that “while we saw support for both package sizes, we saw stronger support the kind that’s typically needed to pass in a vote towards the $1.2 billion option.” The risk-averse Harrell administration made a similar argument when it chose a middle-of-the-road housing levy renewal last year; that renewal passed with 69 percent of the vote.
The public has until April 26 to provide feedback on proposal, which will go to the city council in May.
Come on, this city is owned by aggressive Tesla drivers, and this levy is just for them. New bridge for Magnolia and smooth major thoroughfares to use as your personal freeway. Just like the “One Seattle Comprehensive Plan”, which by way of the simple mechanism of constricting supply is a huge gift to our city’s land asset owners and the industries that support them (who are the selfsame aggressive Tesla drivers), you can see who our city is being managed for right there.
How much of the levy money on street/bridges is filling potholes/making sure the bridges don’t collapse? That’s a no brainer to any mayor thinking of running for reelection.
Seattle’s original transit sin is not passing Forward Thrust (when the Feds would have built subways at almost no cost to the city). We’re now left with ST3 (coming in 30 years!) Ed Murray/Scott Kubly give Amazon a light rail stop (even if they leave) and not ask minority residents if a second tunnel would disrupt business in the ID.
The Levy, as usual, focuses on expenditures for the technological and the physical when the issue of safety could be better addressed with behavioral changes and funding to create them. From the Washington State DOH:
“ According to the Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC), driver and occupant behavior is responsible for the majority of all motor vehicle crashes. WTSC’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan (Target Zero) reports that between 2009 and 2011, 71.4 percent of traffic fatalities involved driver impairment, speed, and/or run-off-the road collisions. These three areas were often in play together and resulted in 1,006 deaths during the three year period.”
Now we have even more impaired drivers under the influence of drugs and high THC marijuana. We also no longer have driver’s Ed in the schools, adding to the already high proportion of accidents caused by youth. Restore drivers Ed. Regulate high THC cannabis. Create billboard safety campaigns and up the social pressure against impaired driving. Return to requiring accountability for speeding, and for crimes that include the use of a car as a weapon (the now-bi-weekly car thefts and crash and grabs) categorize the crime as assault with a deadly weapon and lower the age at which youth can can be tried as adults.
We should have good bus lanes but it seems like bike advocates want to take those lanes for themselves. They skinned Aurora Ave to two lanes each way by Green lake and want to reduce traffic lanes as far north as possible even though we’ve spent millions putting in the interurban trail and bike lanes from Green lake to Haller Lake and beyond that are very protected and safe for bikes. Putting bikes on Aurora will slow buses to a crawl and slow freight and car traffic to a crawl as well. It’s already at a crawl. What we need are sidewalks and ped bridges for safety along Aurora. Also a focus to reduce crime in that corridor.
Bless your hearts for advocating for less car-centric transportation, but if Seattle can’t get cars off Pike Place, anything more ambitious – however common-sense – isn’t likely to happen.
I am in Paris this week, a city which also styles itself as a city of neighborhoods. To paraphrase, I have seen the 15 minute city and it works. And it’s *quiet.* As the proprietor of Not Just Bikes reminds us, cities aren’t loud: cars are loud. How many places in Seattle can you walk out your door and come back in 5 minutes with world-class breads and fresh-brewed coffee?
After 24 years in Seattle, the only takeaway I have is that there is no will to make it a different place, more welcoming, less stressful, more equal, whatever you like. There is a deeply entrenched minority (maybe? could be the majority but I doubt it) that wants to protect the status quo of cars and parking and private spaces over public ones. And streets are by definition public spaces as well as a carveout from the use of land for more beneficial purposes…commerce or housing or whatever. Seattle is 84 sq miles. Every inch taken for car storage is one that can’t be used to housing or dynamic multi-use development.
Seattle is not dense enough for the kind of rich dynamic life like I see here, and I don’t think waiting for it to happen is going to work. Someone is going to have to make it happen but I don’t see any Baron Hausmann on the horizon, and especially not on city council. The centering of cars and the people who love them in every discussion means there will also be some reason to delay or defer other transportation strategies. But as long as single family castles with fenced-in pleasure grounds, private cars stored on public streets, and valuable land sitting idle downtown as parking in the midst of a housing crisis, nothing will change.
What puzzles me is how many people from Seattle and other USA cities will travel to Paris or London and come back with any insight about how things could be different. Overhearing some conversations in the museum queues suggests those people don’t actually use the solutions that would help their own cities: they take cabs rather than travel on the Métro. So they are not learning about the art of living today…just the art of the past, displayed in galleries. Frozen in time, like their mindset.
the focus on car stuff in the levy proposal was obvious to me even without the climate and streets advocates calling it out. And if it’s obvious to me, it’s baaaad.