Category: Opinion

Opinion, Transit

Sound Transit’s Bespoke Wayfinding System Is Unnecessarily Baffling

 

International visitors have likely never seen anything quite like it.

By Erica C. Barnett

For Sound Transit, the World Cup games could serve as a test of the changes the light-rail agency has made to its wayfinding signage over the past few years. Sound Transit has said the changes put the region’s transit agency in line with “international standards” and make the signs easier for international travelers, non-English speakers, and people with certain disabilities to understand.

But some of the new features, such as the addition of station numbers to route maps and the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.

Under the new wayfinding system, each station has a three-digit numeric code that’s displayed prominently on signs at stations, transit maps, and on trains themselves. Westlake, for instance, is now rendered as “150,” indicating that riders are at station 50 on the 1 line.

State law requires some kind of station identifier that people with limited English proficiency can easily remember. Previously, Sound Transit used a series of baffling pictograms; these included two types of bird, two types of boat, and both a moose and a deer. Unfortunately, the three-digit system seems like a marginal improvement, at best, over the twee old silhouette-style images.

Sound Transit spokeswoman Amy Enbysk said numeric station codes “are commonly used in many international transit systems to support riders with limited English proficiency, as well as visitors who may not be familiar with the region,” pointing to cities like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai that use station numbers. However, most major cities on every non-Asian continent— London to São Paolo to Thessaloniki—use names, not numbers, to identify stations, and they indicate station locations with simple dots. The more visual clutter a sign has, the more confusing it becomes.

But maybe I’m an outlier? According to Enbysk, the new three-digit identifiers tested well in focus groups and “customer feedback on the station codes has generally been positive, including requests to expand them to digital signage and onboard displays, which we have done.” It’s notable, though, that each station now includes a key—in English—explaining how to decode the new numeric system.

Sound Transit also has duplicate station numbers on each of its two lines, so someone who is navigating entirely by station numbers will also have to remember if they’re looking for, say, stop 56 is on the green line (where it’s 156) or the blue line (where it’s 256).

The potential for rider confusion is only compounded by the fact that Sound Transit now uses the terminal station for each line to identify which direction a train is going, rather than simple directions (north/south, east/west) or common destinations (“downtown Seattle”/”Airport”). Thus, a rider going downtown from Beacon Hill has to decide whether to stand on the side of the station that’s bound for “Lynnwood City Center” or “Downtown Federal Way,” with no obvious indication where these two non-destination cities are located geographically.

According to Enbysk, Sound Transit doesn’t use cardinal directions because most people tend to think in terms of “landmarks and destination,” not which way they’re headed. And they don’t use terms like “uptown/downtown” or “Seattle/Eastside” because light rail isn’t a “hub and spoke” system where the lines radiate from a central location, but a system that “services multiple major cities in the region.”

This rationale strikes me as typical Seattle exceptionalism, not an actual reason to omit basic, useful information from wayfinding signs. The New York City subway system, which serves a population 10 times the size of Seattle, has trains going in all different directions and isn’t really a hub-and-spoke system either, yet stations have simple, basic information about where to board with signs that indicate whether a train is generally going toward Brooklyn or Manhattan, for example. There’s no reason Sound Transit couldn’t do the same thing. Instead, our bespoke signage requires people to memorize the names of far-flung stations just to know what side of the platform to stand on.


Once a rider gets off the train, there may be one last hurdle before they reach their destination: Underground station exits that have been stripped of information about where each exit emerges at the surface Instead of “northwest corner of Fourth and Pine,” for instance, riders emerging at Westlake station face options like “A1,”  “A2,” “B,” and “C.”

According to Enbysk, “Exit lettering (Exit A, B, C, etc.) is another common approach used by many rail and transit systems, such as Paris, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong, as it allows signs to remain concise in constrained spaces. We are then able to provide more detailed street and landmark information on maps and exit directories.” The difference between Seattle and all the systems Enbysk mentioned is that those systems do include information about exit locations alongside their station letters (here’s Rio, for example). Seattle’s system is the only one I’ve personally encountered that eliminates all potentially helpful information from its platform-level exit signs.

(Ironically, Seattle’s exit signs are only in English. It’s not that “Exit” is hard to decipher, but exits are one area where there is an internationally adopted image that indicates “exit” no matter what language you speak, and Sound Transit doesn’t use it.)

Sound Transit’s wayfinding system seems—perhaps not without reason—like a series of well-intentioned choices made by people who don’t actually use transit regularly. As a transit rider navigating a new city for the first time, I’m generally looking for the familiar visual language shared by most transit systems in the US and worldwide—a language that prioritizes information over the visual clutter of numbers, letters, and codes.

I kind of wish Sound Transit had surveyed World Cup visitors to ask them which is easier—memorizing information like “green/1 Line toward Lynnwood City Center, get off at Station 60, Exit A1,” or “ride the 1 line toward downtown and get off at Westlake on 5th Ave”? Based on the way most of the world does wayfinding, I can guess which one they’d pick.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Opinion, Transit

The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers announced a revised, “affordable” capital plan for the regional rail system at a meeting of the agency’s executive board on Thursday. The proposal attempts to close a $34.5 billion budget shortfall by focusing on the “spine” of the system, from Everett to Tacoma, while putting off major projects in Seattle that helped the Sound Transit 3 plan pass overwhelmingly here, most notably including the segment from downtown to Ballard.  The agency will fully design the Ballard extension and the Graham Street and Boeing Access Road infill station but postpone all three “until new resources or third party funding can advance them,” as ST’s deputy director Alex Krieg put it yesterday.

Ryan Packer, at the Urbanist, has been covering this story closely (probably between the top-secret closed-door meetings with Mayor Wilson that had the Seattle Times editorial board spewing smoke from their ears this morning!), so I’ll direct you to their story earlier this week for all the details about the new plan.

What I want to focus on is the insistence of most members of the Sound Transit board on living in an alternate reality—one where stopping the line at Seattle Center is completing the first part of the “Ballard” line, and where taking on debt well into the next century is a sustainable way to fund a train system.

Board members, including those from Seattle, have insisted that the regional rail agency isn’t truly “deferring” anything and that the entire ST3 package approved by voters in 2016 will get built—just as soon as Sound Transit comes up with a plan to cut costs and get new resources to build out the system voters have been funding for the past 10 years.

During a Transportation Choices Coalition-sponsored panel about the plan earlier this week, Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The fact that part of the project does not appear in the ‘affordable’ plan does not mean that it is being canceled or delayed or deferred. And so one of the things that I want to see is just a really clear plan for, as we do that work, adding [the missing stations and rail lines] back into the plan. And I’m not even talking like any more revenue for this. It’s just that we need to get further along in the planning process, and then suddenly you’re going to see more stations kind of magically come back into affordability.”

King County Councilmember (and former city council member) Teresa Mosqueda echoed Wilson’s comments at the board meeting Thursday, telling Somers, “I heard you say that nothing is deferred indefinitely, that we are not abandoning any lines or projects, and that we are committed to final design, getting ultimately to Ballard, Issaquah, and wanting the infill stations. … I see this as a need to present a ‘Yes, and’ proposal. Yes, we hear you that the community and this board want the full Sound Transit 3, and we recognize in order to accomplish that, you need to have additional financing tools.”

What about those additional financing tools? Sound Transit board members, and many transit advocates desperate to complete the long-promised system, have laid their hopes on the state legislature, which last year rejected a proposal to allow Sound Transit to sell unprecedented 75-year bonds to pay for costs that weren’t included in the voter-approved plan. (Really, plans—the long-“deferred” Graham Street Station was supposed to built as part of ST1).

There’s currently little public discussion, outside reflexively anti-tax conservative media, about whether it’s a good idea to put taxpayers on the hook for this rail system until the 22nd century. For rail advocates, it seems to be a settled debate. And no one is talking much right now about what ST4 will include.

The only board member who has relentlessly insisted on speaking bluntly about what Sound Transit is actually proposing is City Councilmember Dan Strauss. Strauss is no one’s idea of a firebrand, but he is extremely protective of the neighborhood at the heart of his district, Ballard, and he’s made no secret of his outrage that the plan cuts defers postpones the Ballard extension for the foreseeable future. Ballard, as Strauss points out often, has been upzoned three times since voters approved ST3 ten years ago. It’s now designated as a “regional center” in the city’s comprehensive plan, the densest possible designation, and is slated for another upzone later this year. Thanks to all those new people living in Ballard, Sound Transit has projected daily ridership as high as 147,000 people along the Ballard segment—the highest ridership in the system.

“Sound Transit did not provide an approach that maximized ridership,” Strauss said at the TCC event earlier this week. “If they had, they would be looking at the dollar per rider figure that the Ballard Lake extension provided.”

At Thursday’s ST board meeting, Strauss asked the board, semi-facetiously, to change the name of the “Ballard Link initial segment,” which ends at Seattle Center, to the “Downtown tunnel” segment, “because that is being transparent with the public about what segments we are funding.” It’s too bad the other Seattle representatives on the board aren’t equally committed to being honest with voters about what we’re getting with Sound Transit’s new “affordable” plan.

City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

By Erica C. Barnett

As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.

Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.

The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.

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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”

The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs.  In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that  “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)

As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.

You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z

The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.

Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.

During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.

Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”

“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”

The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.

One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”

Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that  includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

Economy, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event
View from the cheap cheap cheap cheap seats at Wednesday’s State of Downtown Seattle event.

By Erica C. Barnett

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, I got a kick out of Mayor Katie Wilson’s speech, in which she cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event. Wilson spoke after King County Executive Girmay Zahliay, who touted his three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate to surprisingly tepid applause.

It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t kowtow a bit to her corporate audience—saying, for example, that she wants to “keep our parks and public spaces welcoming and accessible to all” by “finally … putting people inside in large numbers.” People experiencing behavioral health crises “can make  the people around them feel less safe,” Wilson said. “We have to acknowledge that, and we have to do more to make all of our streets and public spaces feel more welcoming for people of all incomes and backgrounds, whether they live downtown or tourists visiting our city for the first time.”

But Wilson also used the occasion to frame a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority. “As a progressive and as a socialist— as a progressive and as a socialist—I believe it’s very important for people to have faith in their government, and that means, among other things, being able to trust that it is a good and effective steward of our collective resources. We can’t be afraid to stop funding things that aren’t working well.” (Ahem.)

The keynote speaker, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, was the co-author (along with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein), of Abundance—the book every pro-market urbanist in your life was urging you to read last year. Sounds like this was happening to Wilson, too, and she finally get around to reading it after the election.

It was pretty clear Wilson wasn’t as taken with the book as those who embraced it as a clever takedown of progressive dogma. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because she saw through its paper-thin thesis—that if liberals would only become libertarians, we’d live in an age of abundant housing, transportation, consumer products, and energy.

“Some of you might know that in my prior career, in addition to being a community organizer, I was also a columnist who’s written for some of our local publications, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t been running for office last year, I would have found time to write my critical take on the abundance framework,” Wilson said. “Now I’m in a role where I have to muzzle myself a little bit, so I’m going to resist the temptation, having an audience with Derek, to give my Abundance TED Talk.”

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Instead, she said, she’d focus on some things she liked from the book, like the Urbanism 101 argument that NIMBY land-use restrictions prevent housing from being built.

“I have to say, I also really love the abundance vision of the world, in the not-far-off year of 2050, when we’ve achieved such abundance and productivity that the work week has been shortened to just a few days,” Wilson continued. “I do hope that 10 or so years from now, when AI has thoroughly disrupted the job market, and you start hearing a national rally cry for a 24-hour work week, that many of the far-sighted business leaders here today will hop on board that train.”

I haven’t reviewed Abundance, and I’ll try not to here, but the few minutes I saw of Thompson’s PowerPoint presentation before I had to leave for an event across were pretty misleading examples—tailored for a a roomful of business elites who are inclined to oppose taxes and believe in the awesome power of free markets.

Thompson extolled Lakewood, a suburb of L.A., as an example of the dense housing that can happen in the suburbs when government gets out of the way. (Lakewood, as a contrast to Petaluma in Northern California, is a central example in the book.) But Lakewood sits on an artificial oasis in what would otherwise be harsh, unwelcoming desert, and that oasis was made possible by government intervention in the early 20th century, when Los Angeles diverted water from farmland, destroying farmers’ livelihoods to build a city in an otherwise uninhabitable area. The conflict became known as the Water Wars.

Similarly, Thompson’s praise for Texas and its vast solar farms would be inspiring, except that Texas (where I’m from) has a notoriously unreliable power grid—a fact that the dominant Republicans in the state, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have falsely blamed on renewable energy. They’ve also been working steadily for the past decade to undermine wind and solar while doubling down on fossil-fuel subsidies—but never mind that, look at this slide of a solar farm!

Thompson brushed past another example of what he considers anti-“abundance” waste—the fact that affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless people costs more to build than market rate apartments—by saying there was no reason for this to be the case. While it’s true that rules for affordable housing can increase costs, a bigger cost driver financing, which typically comes from many public and private sources and can take months or years to secure. Eliminating unnecessary regulation is important, but it’s only part of the story—and  “abundance” advocates often simply ignore the reasons for some regulations, such as building codes and accessibility requirements.

As I said, I ducked out of Thompson’s talk after about two minutes (remember, I did read the book.*) But I hope the mayor will elaborate at some point—maybe on Seattle Nice!—about her reaction to the “libertarian, but make it pro-social” argument at the center of this bestseller.

*  Which, by the way, also lacks any substantive class or racial analysis and conveniently elides the experience of poor people in the US and the rest of the world. Somebody’s gotta mine all those rare-earth metals, pose as AI sexbots, and pilot those “autonomous” delivery robots, after all, and it ain’t gonna be the elites who write bestselling books promising us a frictionless technotopia is right around the corner.

Mayor Wilson, Media, Opinion, Police, public disclosure

Mayor Wilson: Audit SPD’s Public Disclosure Office!
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.

SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.

Erica C. Barnett

It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.

The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”

For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise.  Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.

Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).

In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.

Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.

As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. …  Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”

I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.

If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.

The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.

Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.

 

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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.

SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.

That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.

SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.

Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.

In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)

Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.

Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.

This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.

The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.

SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.

But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.

An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.

City Council, Density, Opinion, The C Is for Crank

Cathy Moore’s Opinions on Growth and Housing Aren’t New. What’s New is That Most Voters Disagree With Them.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore lashed out at members of the public who she said attacked her personally over her support for legislation (which Ryan Packer covered in detail at the Urbanist) that would have required Sound Transit to create bespoke Community Outreach Plans for every light rail-related project that requires the city to approve a master use permit, about 60 projects in all. The original proposal, sponsored by Maritza Rivera, would have added more process, delay, and cost to the already delayed, over-budget light rail expansion to Ballard and West Seattle.

Moore—whose comments I quoted at length in yesterday’s post about the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, and which you can view above—said people were directing “hate” and “personal attacks” at her over the legislation. She spoke at length about her long record of public service, suggesting that her critics were unfairly maligning someone who has “dedicated 30-plus years to improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here,for all this love that I get every day.” Prior to her 2023 election, Moore served in many different judicial roles, including five years as a King County Superior Court judge.

It’s true that Moore didn’t get much love from the public for supporting proposals that would slow down or prevent housing from being built, and that hundreds of people mobilized to write emails to Moore and other councilmembers urging them to vote against the amendment.

Ultimately, the legislation—a bill from the mayor’s office that was actually supposed to speed up permitting for light rail-related projects in the city—moved out of the council’s land use committee without the red-tape amendment—not because the public was mean to council members, but because it didn’t have majority support. Instead, the committee considered and passed an unpublished walk-on amendment from Rivera that requires Sound Transit to produce a report about its public outreach for each project that requires a permit.

One thing that was striking about Moore’s comments yesterday, and comments she’s made about other hot topics like tree preservation requirements and proposals to allow more apartments in her district, is that she isn’t proposing anything new. Rather, she’s calling for a return to policies that the council and mayor generally supported 20 years ago. But those policies are no longer in step with the majority in Seattle, which is why most of them have failed to pass. This is how democracy is supposed to work. The fact that people are calling Moore a NIMBY—for “not in my backyard”—reflects dramatic changes in public opinion about housing in recent decades. NIMBY isn’t a slur—it’s a description.

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Having covered City Hall in the old NIMBY days—back when councilmembers openly used terms like “protecting neighborhood character” and neighborhood activists denigrated renters as “transients” who had no right to comment on land use or housing—I can tell you that pro-housing advocates used to be pariahs at city hall. (Hell, I remember being called a “clueless little twit” by a West Seattle homeowner because I argued that renters deserved a voice at City Hall). The very idea that we should allow duplexes, much less apartments, in single-family areas would get you shouted down by homeowners furious that renters thought they had any right to encroach on the sanctified character of “their” neighborhoods. Think of the shadows those huge new three-story buildings would cast on their tomato plants!

Things have changed; public opinion in Seattle has shifted. The views of people who bought their houses for five-figure sums in the ’60s and ’70s are no longer massively overrepresented on the city council. Even as a body made up overwhelmingly of homeowners (the job pays well enough that renters who join the council can usually buy at least a condo, and do), the council now represents renters’ perspectives better than it ever has in the past, and that trend is unlikely to reverse.

Bottom line: We’re a bigger city now than we were in the old “lesser Seattle” days, and the people who live here—Moore’s constituents—generally want to do away with “not in my backyard” policies, including red tape and design review requirements that slow down and prevent housing and transit. Moore wouldn’t have gotten much pushback for her views if she’d been on the council in 2001, but in 2025, she represents a minority perspective, and she’s facing inevitable criticism for policy proposals that are broadly unpopular.

I empathize with the pain Moore is clearly feeling as the result of public opposition; being attacked and called names is unpleasant and can be very upsetting. But the fact is, calling someone a NIMBY isn’t an expression of “hate.” It’s just a description of a once-dominant perspective that most of the Seattle public no longer holds.