By Josh Feit

66 percent = A Supermajority

I’ve gone from stunned, to angry, to eventually, “oh, Seattle” since I first learned more than a decade ago that the Seattle Department of Transportation doesn’t charge for street parking in West Seattle. So, while I wasn’t exactly breaking out the champagne, I was relieved when the city finally announced on September 30 that it has decided to expand its parking demand management program to the West Seattle Junction (and to Upper Queen Anne as well.)

The SDOT program, which exists in most business districts in the city, regularly reviews parking availability from Ballard to Roosevelt to Capitol Hill to South Lake Union to Columbia City, tweaking the dials on parking rates to ensure there’s always one to two spots open per block. The well-tested theory behind the (mostly) citywide policy, first enacted in 2010, goes like this: When people have to pay for parking, they’re likely to be more efficient with their time, which leaves more spaces open more often. Showing great forbearance, SDOT patiently explained this concept and the change—$1 an hour in the morning to  $4 an hour in the evening—to West Seattle residents, as documented in their recent report.

According to SDOT’s “intercept” surveys of West Seattle Junction visitors (conducted in-person rather than online), a 66 percent supermajority of people said they walked, biked, or took transit to the Junction as opposed to driving.

This provides a potential new rejoinder to complaints from businesses about paid street parking.

The longstanding and obvious retort is that rather than decreasing the number of people who can park and shop, paid parking adds more shoppers by making parking spots more readily available. Now SDOT can add this: The fact that a supermajority of people aren’t even driving to the commercial district in the first place means the shopping-while-driving customer isn’t the seismic constituency shopkeepers may assume they are.

The 66 percent number tracks. It’s similar to the 60+ percent number the SDOT’s survey found in Upper Queen Anne.

Admittedly, SDOT’s online surveys showed the opposite: More people in those surveys said they drive in to the Junction and (though less so) to Upper Queen Anne as well. The online sample size was also bigger. But with hundreds of in-person respondents who were actually interviewed in the neighborhood, the West Seattle and Queen Anne surveys seem noteworthy enough for SDOT to call out, which they did in the Queen Anne report under the banner “Many People Visit Without Driving.” They also noted the supermajority in the West Seattle report. “While 71% of online respondents said they typically drive to the Junction, our intercept survey found 66% of respondents typically walk, bike, or take transit to the Junction.”

Slower Bus Service > Faster Bus Service

I’m all for dedicated lanes and multiple-door boarding and inline platforms. And I’m a yes to off-board payment and synchronized traffic lights and queue jumps. Give me all the smart-bus fixes that speed up service. What I’m not for is taking away stops on one of the busiest local bus lines in the city. That’s the current vision for the 7, which King County Metro plans to replace with the Rapid Ride R line—R for Rainer. The county council is scheduled to vote on the the changes—which could reduce the number of bus stops on the popular 7 by about 30 percent—before the end of the year.

Council members and Metro planners should remember that R also stands for Rely on, which is exactly what many of the 11,000 daily 7 riders do—to get to local grocery stores, services, and appointments along the Rainier corridor itself and not necessarily, as the RapidRide plan seems to imagine, travel exclusively to downtown.

To quote Anna Zivarts’ recent editorial for us: “The downtown-centric alignment of the Rapid Ride R was based on pre-pandemic destination data. Despite profound changes in commute patterns since then, there hasn’t been time or resources to examine whether Rainier Valley’s transit needs have evolved.”

Eliminating stops along one of the most heavily used local bus routes in the city seems likely to make it less popular and less reliable.

5 to 4 > 6 to 3

Seattle voters have a chance to second 2025’s election results in a few weeks. Which I hope they do to make it clear for the the Seattle-is-Dying media that bashing Mayor Wilson for the past year hasn’t prompted the backlash they’re hoping for.

Last year, in addition to electing dorky socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, Seattle also added two much-needed progressives to the council’s vote count, nudging city hall from an 8-1 conservative-bloc roll call to a less- dominant 6-3 dynamic by adding brainiac lefty Dionne Foster and urbanist attorney Eddie Lin.

Foster and Lin have been great additions so far. Former Washington Progress Alliance ED Foster, no surprise; YIMBY Lin for rookie legislator of the year (thank you for reining in hearing examiner appeals on land-use decisions)! They’ve both joined charismatic Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the most reliable lefty of the three.

Three is still less than six, though. North Seattle voters now have a chance to add a fourth progressive to the mix, Nilu Jenks, whose strong showing in the primary bodes well for the ongoing trend away from the Harrell years. And with swing votes like Rob Saka and Dan Strauss occasionally breaking from the majority, even that 5 to 4 conservative hold could be tenuous.

All this is to say, our progressive mayor may soon have more votes to work with on the second floor.

A question would remain, though. Can she work with them?

Josh@PubliCola.com