As they spin headlines to make Mayor Katie Wilson look bad, local TV news’ populist schtick fails news reporting basics. Taking the word of an unnamed source from SPD who says the press conference after July’s Seattle-Center shooting was delayed because Wilson was waiting on “dignitaries” (the governor and the Seattle congresswoman) is a delusional account if you actually read the email and text message threads from that night.
What the behind-the-scenes conversations between the mayor’s office and SPD show is that as soon as 6:30, immediately after the shooting, Wilson was looking to her staff and to SPD to assess the possibility of going to Seattle Center to make a statement. SPD, however, told her to hold off as they secured the scene. They then withheld critical information—namely, that the shooting wasn’t terrorism or a mass shooting, but a personal fracas, keeping the public largely in the dark for five and a half hours, between 7:30 and 1am when they put out a blog post about the incident. The police were also in delay mode because they were waiting for (now former) chief Shon Barnes to get a briefing and hold a Teams call with elected officials..
This chaos stalled Wilson’s trip to Seattle Center. But when she finally got there shortly after 10 pm, and a presser was ready to go, (with the SPD still reticent on the details) there was a wait of less than half an hour for Governor Ferguson and Congresswoman Jayapal to arrive—far less than the length of time SPD kept critical information from the public.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
My favorite way of judging the mayor—and one that is actually populist (despite the convoluted right-wing notion that riding the bus is somehow elitist)—is by keeping my eye on the infamous (L)8 bus.
Wilson, the founder and former co-director of the Transit Riders Union, has thrown money, fresh paint, and SDOT planners at the historically sluggish, major east-west route. The first part of her plan—an eastbound bus-only lane on Denny—went into effect on August 24. And as part of Wilson’s plan, Metro added more buses the same week.
And, well, well, well. It’s still early (and there are more fixes to come), but dramatic signs of improvement are already clear. On-time performance jumped to from 68.6 percent percent to 77.8 percent between this August and August 2025, an increase that only includes one week of improved service on the 8. So far in September, on-time performance has continued to climb, to 78.5 percent.
The 7,203 average daily riders (July’s numbers) who rely on the 8 likely appreciate Mayor Wilson’s focus on the basics; as a regular rider, I know I do.
Living Alone ≠ The Housing Crisis
The Seattle Times’ FYI Guy claims the sharp increase in people living solo is “eating up” units, saying we could address most of the housing crisis without building new housing if those selfish singles would just “double up.”
First of all, my own FYI: People who “live alone” don’t live alone. We’re living in multifamily buildings with plenty of other people. This type of dense housing is better for the environment and brings down rents.
The Seattle Times column goes onto to pooh-pooh the idea that rigid zoning is the culprit, even though Seattle’s suburban character notoriously limits mutlifamily housing in the city.
So, I guess, for my contribution, I should ask someone to move in with me in my 350-square-foot apartment to lower regional housing costs while those who eat up 5,000-square-foot lots should continue to manspread.
Back in 2021, I went to visit one of the young people I was organizing alongside. Abby Griffith lived in an affordable housing complex in Vancouver, Washington, and she kept on telling me how difficult it was for her to access transit because of how far the bus stop was from the complex.
I remember looking it up on a map, and thinking, pfft, that’s not really that bad—what is she complaining about? But then when I met Abby at her apartment and we walked the distance together, I realized how long it took her, as a blind person who uses a white cane to navigate, to cover the distance to the stop. What had seemed like no big deal to me added enough extra time to every trip that it created a significant travel barrier for her every time she wanted to leave her apartment.
I keep coming back to this walk with Abby when I think about the proposed Rapid Ride R. What would it mean for Rainier Valley residents who rely on transit to lose access to their local bus stop as stops are consolidated and cut in order to reduce travel times along the route? Will the Rapid Ride R be a positive change for the many seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income families who rely on the bus for our travel needs?
The Rapid Ride R is proposed as a replacement to the 7, which is Metro’s second busiest route, moving 11,000 transit riders daily through some of the most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the region. I’ve never ridden another bus where there’s more competition for the flexible space in the front. Between walkers, wheelchairs, strollers and grocery carts, space is a premium. And for many of these users, longer trips along Rainier Valley’s cracked and crumbling sidewalks to get to more-distant bus stops would make travel significantly more difficult.
It’s not just people with disabilities and seniors that will experience these proposed changes as a new barrier. Parents with young children will understand this, as will anyone who has tried to carry something heavy or unwieldy (a melting paper bag of groceries, for example) home from the bus stop.
In 2020, Metro estimated the Rapid Ride R could save 7-12 minutes of travel time compared to the 7. But since then, the Seattle Department of Transportation has installed most of the planned bus-only lanes, meaning that much of the anticipated time savings have already been realized. Frustratingly, because of a rushed timeline (Metro wants the King County Council to approve the alignment by the end of this year) the agency hadn’t had time to do any new analysis, so it’s hard to know if, eliminating stops as proposed will meaningfully improve travel times compared to the 7 bus today. Even a 10-minute faster trip isn’t faster for you if you have to walk an extra 10 minutes to get to a further bus stop.
There’s also the bigger question: Is a slightly faster route from Rainier Valley to downtown Seattle the best investment, compared to other potential transit priorities for Southeast Seattle? 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.
When I talk to other transit riders, I’ve heard people say they have plenty of transit options to get downtown—light rail provides a direct and express route already. What we’re missing are direct routes to Tukwila, Renton and First Hill, as well as east-west connections to places like Georgetown and South Park. Perhaps Metro thinks there is an untapped market of currently-driving downtown office workers who could be enticed to start riding the Rapid Ride. But for the rest of us already using transit in Rainier Valley, I doubt many of us would pick the Rapid Ride R alignment as our top priority.
There’s also the issue of what happens to transit riders who rely on the 7 in the area south of Henderson Street, sincethe proposed R would head towards the Rainier Beach light rail station instead of heading further south. This area has seen a lot of recent apartment construction and is also home to the Rainier Beach Safeway and the older Lake Washington Apartments complex. Metro seems to be suggesting that transit demand in this area can be met by Metro Flex, an on-demand transit service, but my own and other users’ experiences, trying to use Flex in this area is frustrating, impractical and not at all comparable to a regularly scheduled, fixed-route bus.
There are parts of the Rapid Ride investment proposal that make a lot of sense. Bus priority signals would allow buses to queue jump at intersections (let’s hope this can fix the delays at the Jackson/Rainier interchange). There are still places where the bus gets caught in traffic and bus-only lanes should be extended.
Most critically, if you’ve ever walked along or waited at a bus stop along Rainier on a rainy day, you’ve probably been soaked as passing cars splash you with gutter puddle juice. Rainier needs drainage upgrades and there are a lot of places that desperately need new sidewalks. Level boarding platforms at bus stops could potentially ease the boarding process for the many Rainier Valley transit riders traveling with wheelchairs, walkers, strollers and grocery carts.
But right now, it’s unclear whether the funding for this full suite of improvements exists and where it would come from. The 2024 Seattle Transportation Levycontains funding for repaving on the northern section of Rainier from Walden Street to Jackson, which will include sidewalk improvements. But who and what funding source would pay for other pedestrian infrastructure upgrades remains unclear.
Metro’s timeline for community engagement ends August 31. So far, the proposal has received very little media coverage, aside from this detailed Seattle Transit Blog piece, and I worry that many transit riders in the Rainier Valley haven’t had a chance to learn what’s being proposed. I called into an online open house on Saturday where I was one of three community members in attendance.
I want to see transit and infrastructure dollars go to Rainier Valley. I’m thrilled that there’s political momentum behind doing so. But I want to make sure we’re taking this opportunity to make the investments that community members need today.
Anna Zivarts is the founder and executive director of the Nondrivers Alliance, which has launched a petition to question the elimination of local transit stops on Rainier.
Editor’s note: This piece originally said a repaving project went from Rainier to Walker Street; in fact, it goes from Rainier to Walden street. The post has been corrected.
First, a quick follow-up to last week’s item about former state house candidate Ron Davis. ICYMI: Despite the fact that the Stranger endorsed a long list of progressives, Davis contended—in a 3,000-word email to his supporters—that because the paper didn’t endorse him, there’s reason to believe a cabal of centrist oligarchs have taken over the paper and are calling the shots on endorsements.
Surprise: It turns out Davis isn’t actually Neo in the Matrix. According to members of the Stranger’s endorsement board, there’s a banal reason he didn’t get the nod from them. I’ll put this as gently as I can: Davis is not a great listener. The SECB wasn’t thrilled with the mansplaining.
Okay. On to this week in X>Y.
No Cars in Pike Place Market > Cars in Pike Place Market
Despite increased business at Pike Place Market and broad public support for the no-cars pilot project that coincides with the bullish numbers, SDOT is looking at opening the Market back up to cars starting this October. Ryan Packer at the Urbanist has been all over the story.
The naive thing about undoing the new pedestrian-only version of Pike Place Market, which went into effect in April 2025 and tracks to a notable 8.8 percent increase in local visitors who live between 3 and 5 miles away, is that it’s not the only pro-pedestrian upgrade in the area. Have you noticed the new multi-billion-dollar Waterfront Park, including the $70 million Overlook Walk that melds directly into the Market? It’s a whole feng shui down there now. And it started, emphatically enough, when we tore down the car-choked Viaduct.
Pike Place Market is now just one element in a comprehensive waterfront makeover that has embraced pedestrians and de-emphasized cars. It’s one thing Seattle has gotten right.
7 > 69
The Seattle Metro Chamber is trolling me.
Their most recent polling had a stat that made my heart leap: 69 percent of people agreed with the concept that “Building more housing will help slow down Seattle’s increasing housing costs.” This might seem like easy-peasy Econ 101 to you, but as someone who’s been pushing this once-radical urbanist idea since 2004, I was pleasantly surprised to see it’s now conventional wisdom; 58 percent even agreed with the once-anathema notion that “All things considered, growth and development has been a positive for my area.”
Ah, but then, in the same poll, this: Only 7 percent of people think “more density” is among the top one or two things the city should be doing to improve quality of life.
So, nearly everyone supports the idea of growth and building more, but only a smidgen actually think it’s something we should prioritize? Isn’t there a term for that dysfunctional way of thinking. Oh, right. NIMBY.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
According to SDOT’s Fremont Bridge tracker, Seattle bike and scooter commuting hit its highest count in Seattle history last month. The previous high was set pre-pandemic in August 2019.
Tom Fucoloro at Seattle Bike Blog, who reported on the data last week with a headline that used the word “obliterated,” writes: “The 153,238 trips was near 11,000 trips more than the previous high-water mark set in August 2019, and total counts for 2026 through July are up more than 18% year-over-year.”
This is excellent news for anyone who supports investing more in multimodal transportation.
And I’ll add another stat: As of July, combined bike and scooter trips are nearly two million higher than last year at this time: 7.2 million versus 5.4 million.
I’m comparing 2026 to 2025 rather than the pre-pandemic 2019 baseline that city planners seem obsessed with these days because all these record-setting bike and scooter numbers exist in a post-pandemic reality that looks nothing like the pre-pandemic world. Fucoloro hints at this in his own analysis by pointing out that return-to-office requirements have generally only gotten downtown office workers back three days a week.
I’d contend the reason we’re lapping pre-pandemic ridership, and doing so when just three days a week is the new RTO norm, has to do with a disproportionate increase in commuting in the so-called off-hours.
For example, another telling 2025 to 2026 comparison: Off-traditional-peak bike and scooter ridership is growing at a faster rate than traditional peak-hour bike and scooter commuting. Ridership at 9 am has grown 21.4 percent while 11 am ridership has grown 23.3 percent. And after work? Ridership at 5 pm has grown 23.7 percent while ridership at 7 pm has grown 27.8 percent. At 8 pm it’s even more pronounced. Ridership has grown 29.8 percent..
There’s a new shape to city life that’s not only about punching the clock. Our infrastructure and planning should adjust to this 21st-century lifestyle rather than looking backward to the old one.
A marathon debate over transit funding, Katie Wilson’s flight patterns, a bill that would limit endless land-use appeals, and more news from the past week.
On the first of two podcast episodes this week, we discussed how the mayor is doing at six months, focusing on her approach to encampment sweeps (she’s doing them), her progress toward her shelter goals (falling short, but better than her predecessor Bruce Harrell), and the likelihood of budget cuts this year (thanks in large part to spending commitments Harrell made, without regard for future budget impacts, right before the 2025 election.)
Guest columnist Brittney Moraski, who’s the advocacy chair for the Seattle Public Library Foundation Board, makes the case for the August library levy measure, which will expand collections, spiff up the aging downtown library, and fund programs like No Late Fines and Peak Picks—not to mentiona quarter of the library’s staff.
Legislation from Councilmember Eddie Lin would get rid of land-use appeals to the city’s hearing examiner, which currently give people who oppose density the ability to stop zoning legislation and comprehensive plan updates in their tracks. The bill would still leave two other post-legislative appeal options open.
City Councilmember Dan Strauss’ legislation expanding eligibility for the city’s Utility Discount Program, which provides deep discounts to ratepayers who qualify, passed easily this week.
Unlike her predecessor Bruce Harrell, who spent large chunks of his term traveling, along with his wife, to conferences and junkets around the nation and world, Mayor Wilson has only left Seattle on city business two times in her first six months, and only once on the city dime. Also unlike her predecessor, Wilson travels in coach—Harrell used his personal wealth to pay for first-class upgrades, including five-figure plane tickets and five-star hotels.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The land use appeal reform bill we covered earlier in the week passed out of the land use committee, and heads to an uncertain vote at the full council.
The city council appears to be split on a Families and Education Levy spending proposal from Joy Hollingsworth and Dionne Foster that would delay funding for universal school meals, which Wilson previously identified as one of her key accomplishments, and use the money instead to pay for take-home food vouchers for low-income kids. Eddie Lin told us it would take a lot to convince him to vote against universal school meals.
It took almost three and a half hours of speeches (and one called question—someone on the council’s reading Robert’s Rules!) but a committee of all nine council members ended up approving Mayor Wilson’s proposed transit sales measure mostly intact. Proposals to cut the size and duration of the tax failed, and there are lots of directives to report on this and that, but chalk this one up as a victory for the mayor. Once it passes full council, the proposal will head to voters in November.
On the second episode of Seattle Nice this week, we talked about that marathon transit discussion, along with my story on Wilson’s travel and a court ruling this week that will allow the nude beach at Denny Blaine Park to remain nude, but not “lewd.”
Also this week:
I was a guest on Rachel Horgan’s The Weekly podcast, where I talked about what it takes to sustain a podcast long-term, the story of how Josh and I founded this independent news site in 2009 and how my business model works now, and what’s been going on in Seattle politics lately. Rachel covers local business news and a lot more every week.
If you’d like to read an entertaining blow-by-blow of Thursday’s big transit tax debate, I covered it live, in way more detail, on Bluesky.
Only losers think this view is cool, apparently. Lully, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Erica C. Barnett
Unlike the Seattle City Council, we sped through several local topics on Seattle Nice this week, discussing the Seattle Transit Measure that passed a key council committee yesterday, along with a proposal that would upend Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to start funding universal school lunches next year using a local levy that pays for education.
During our discussion of the transit tax, Sandeep argued that there needs to be a point when Seattle stops routinely raising taxes, particularly regressive sales taxes (the transit measure renewal would impose a 0.3 percent sales tax, up from the current 0.15 percent). I agree, especially about sales taxes—if it’s gonna get challenged anyway, the legislature should just pass a true progressive income tax—but I also buy the argument that affordable, accessible transit saves low-income riders more money than the tax will cost.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Worth noting: The incremental sales tax increase will cost the median Seattle household, with an income of $124,000 a year, an additional $29 a year. Although Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera expressed concern for, as Rivera put it, “our low-income folks,” low-income Seattle residents will pay significantly less than that median burden—more like an extra buck a month. That isn’t to say the sales tax isn’t regressive (meaning it falls disproportionately on poor people, who spend more of their income on purchases), but it’s important to put the actual cost in perspective. If people are able to take fewer trips in their cars, or get rid of their cars entirely, thanks to better transit service, that dollar a month is well worth it.
We also talked about a local judge’s ruling that will allow people who visit the beach at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ-friendly nude beach, to taking their clothes off. The city still has to take unspecified actions to abate the “public nuisance” of “lewd” behavior, a term King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung used 35 times in his 14-page ruling.
1. My headline did not mean Wilson LITERALLY PURCHASES SEAT 23F every time she travels. I thought this was super obvious, but some people did not and they have very strong feelings about it.
2. Window seats are great, it is normal to want to look out, and a ton of y’all have very weird (passionate!) feelings about the type of people who do or do not prefer window seats and those who do or do not pull the shade down, blocking off the view. (Apparently people who like to look at clouds are babies.)
3. Presumably anyone who reads PubliCola already knows this, but to those admonishing me WHY ARE YOU COVERING THIS INSTEAD OF NEWS, I post news stories that are not about the mayor’s flying habits all week, every week, right here on this very wonky, very in-depth local news site (which you can support right here!)
Rob Saka holds up a button commemorating Shawn Yim, a Metro bus driver killed by a passenger in 2024.
By Erica C. Barnett
It took three hours and 37 minutes—45 minutes longer than the new film The Odyssey—but a city council committee finally approved Mayor Katie Wilson’s updated Seattle Transit Measure sales tax proposal mostly intact; the 0.3-percent sales tax measure is now headed to the full council and ultimately the November ballot. Approval, with a potential new amendment or two, is a foregone conclusion: The committee that approved the proposal includes all nine city council members.
The transit measure, formally known as the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, first passed in 2014; its purpose is to provide additional King County Metro service hours in Seattle, although it has since been amended to include additional spending priorities.
So why such a lengthy meeting? Mostly because council members proposed 30 amendments—23 more than the the last time the measure was in front of the city council, in 2020. Some of these amendments, which I covered in detail two weeks ago, were substantive. Bob Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax to 0.2 percent, later amended to 0.225, would have placed a measure before voters that kept transit service stable rather than expanding it, for instance.
Others were non-substantive directives to the city’s transportation department (SDOT) and King County Metro to study various concepts and performance measures, like the idea of replacing full-size buses with van-like shuttles on low-ridership routes.
The other reason the meeting was so long is that council members—particularly Rob Saka, the long-winded committee chair—insisted on making lengthy speeches before, during, and after almost every amendment, including many where the vote (pro or con) was a foregone conclusion.
I posted live updates throughout the meeting on Bluesky, where you’ll sense my growing frustration with the council’s windbaggy posturing. The rhetoric reached an apex during a discussion about Saka’s amendment to use funding from the transit tax to pay for additional security officers and transit cops.
Supporters, including Saka and Bob Kettle, suggested additional officers might have somehow saved the life of Shawn Yim, the Metro driver who was killed in December 2025 after leaving his bus to pursue a man who had attacked him with pepper spray.
Dionne Foster, one of two votes (along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck) against Saka’s proposal, pointed out that about 10 percent of transit measure funding already goes to transit security, and noted that the city’s 2024 Transportation Levy (thanks largely to a similar push from Saka) included about $9 million in transit security funding that the city hasn’t even figured out how to use yet.
Saka said it’s obvious that Metro needs to hire more transit security, citing data that shows more people are reporting incidents on buses. (This could also be because more people are riding buses). In one such incident, a man broke out several bus windows, reportedly with a machete—a wide, thin blade commonly used in Central America. Saka fixated on this apparently exotic weapon, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated foreign accent—”a mah-chet-EEE! A mah-chet-EEE!”—and emphasizing his point by asking, “Is this a banana republic?”
Despite the lengthy, mostly one-sided debate, Saka’s amendment had plenty of support. It identifies transit security officers, behavioral health specialists, and transit cops as one of the uses for the transit funding measure. Twenty-eight minutes into that discussion, Dan Strauss used a parliamentary move to stop Saka mid-sentence, mercifully “calling the question” on the amendment, which passed 7-2. Here’s that moment:
Few of the remaining substantive changes to Wilson’s proposal moved forward.
As mentioned, Kettle’s amendment to reduce the size of the levy failed, with only Maritza Rivera joining Kettle in voting yes. Rivera, who often brings up her working-class origins in the Bronx, said she didn’t want anyone to suggest that she didn’t support transit. “I have so much support for the transit system, to include that for the almost first 30 years of my life, I exclusively used public transit,” Rivera said. Noting that sales taxes have the greatest negative impact on lower-income people, she continued, “We should not be judged by, sometimes, the decisions that we have to grapple with. It’s not just, do you support it or do do you not. It’s, we do, and there are other considerations.”
Another proposal from Saka, which passed as part of a consent package, directs SDOT, “in partnership with” Metro, to produce annual reports on a long list of data, including on-time performance and reliability; fare recovery rates along with a report on how Metro’s fare recovery compares to at least 20 comparable transit systems; fare compliance actions by Metro; and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served,” including year-over-year comparison reports.
As I mentioned at the outset, one reason this council had so many amendments this year is that they seem not to trust Metro to spend Seattle’s money wisely. Ten of the council’s 30 proposed amendments include requests for reports, which require Metro’s “participation.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The city can’t actually require Metro to do anything, which is why I described these amendments yesterday as a purely performative form of “accountability.” Metro may choose to dedicate staff time and funding to running down all the numbers and data the Seattle City Council is asking for with all these amendments (on Monday, Rivera said, she plans to introduce an amendment requiring reports on ridership across all routes serving all elementary, middle, and high schools across the city), but they are also free to ignore the council’s requests.
The council also spent considerable time yesterday debating how much of the transit measure should go toward capital projects like sidewalks and curb cuts, rather than transit service hours. A Saka amendment, which passed 5-4, directs SDOT to deliver a report to the council on any transit measure funding that goes unspent each year, and expresses the council’s “intent to reappropriate these funds” for capital projects.
Proponents for more capital spending argued that Metro wasn’t able to use all its funding for transit hours in the most recent levy and ended up using that money on capital projects anyway. Opponents, including Rinck, pointed out that the reason Metro didn’t use as many bus hours during the last levy is that there was a global pandemic that reduced ridership to virtually zero.
The bus system is still recovering from that pandemic, but there’s no particular reason to believe ridership won’t continue to rebound over the life of the next transit measure. A staffer attempted to explain this— “I think it’s always useful to remember that the last measure came right at the start of the COVID pandemic, we found ourselves with additional [transit measure] resources piling up, and so there was a decision made by previous councils and the executive to divert those resources to do more capital projects”—but Rivera cut off his explanation, saying, “Because they’re needed. I mean, that’s what I’m going to take away from that.”
A proposal from Rinck to reduce capital spending from $5 million to $2 million a year, predictably, failed, but a separate amendment from Strauss guarantees that at least 75 percent of the transit measure gets spent on transit service.
Saka’s proposal to reduce the term of the tax measure from 10 years to 7 (increased from Saka’s original 6.75-year proposal) failed 7-2, with only Saka and Rivera voting “yes.”
