Category: Transportation

Transportation

Pioneer Square Bike and Scooter Parking Plan Runs Into Road Bumps
The offending potential bike racks (rendering via SDOT)

By Erica C. Barnett

The Pioneer Square Preservation Board and local businesses have raised objections to a Seattle Department of Transportation proposal to install bike and scooter parking spaces in 21 curbside locations in Pioneer Square, calling the proposal too much, too fast and claiming white lines and flex posts are out of keeping with the historic character of Pioneer Square. The Urbanist wrote about an initial briefing on the plan, which raise “a litany of objections” from the board, last month.

The proposed “bike corrals” would serve a dual safety purpose, according to bike and micromobility advocates. First, they would provide more places for people using shared bikes and scooters (primarily from Lime) to park the vehicles on the street instead of on sidewalks, making sidewalks more passable for pedestrians and people with sight and mobility limitations. Second, by blocking off illegal parking spaces, such as those directly in front of stop signs, the “corrals” will improve sightlines for drivers and other road and sidewalk users, “daylighting” intersections and reducing collisions.

“We are supportive of bike corrals at street interections in general, full stop, because they daylight intersections so it makes ti safer for all cyclists,” said Lee Lambert, executive director of the Cascade Bicycle Club. “We also recognize that poorly parked micromobilty devices are a hazard for sidewalk users, and corrals are a solution to that problem. … I would put corrals on every corner if I could.”

But opponents of the SDOT proposal, including the Alliance for Pioneer Square, say the markings and flex posts will be visually disruptive and may be unnecessary, at least in the numbers SDOT is proposing. Alliance director Lisa Howard says her organization prefers a “pilot” of three or four corrals initially to see if people are using them.

“We have been fully supportive of the daylighting and the safety measures. Our feedback has been that the corrals themselves are not a one-size-fits-all response,” Howard said. “Even though it’s white lines and flex posts, if you put 40 of those up and down First Avenue, it’s going to have a major impact.”

Howard said it’s unclear if Pioneer Square proper is even the right location for a large number of new scooter and bike parking areas. “If you’re using a scooter to go to a Sounders game” at the stadiums south of downtown, “you’re not necessarily going to park at First and Yesler and walk the whole remaining quarter mile.”

Lambert said a pilot that small wouldn’t produce good data on how much people use the new corrals, since “the more places you have people to place scooters and bikes, the more likely people are to use them.”

Gordon Padelford, head of Seattle Streets Alliance (formerly Seattle Neighborhood Greenways), said the objections the preservation board and neighborhood advocates have raised so far have largely amounted to a “classic” case of “parking loss weaponized as neighborhood preservation.” (Pioneer Square already has its own neighborhood-specific iron bike racks, a costly if attractive addition won by preservationists in a previous battle over sidewalk space.)

The objections to the loss of these illegal parking spaces are ironic, Padelford pointed out, since the law that created the Pioneer Square Preservation District specifically cites “avoid[ing a proliferation of vehicular parking and vehicular-oriented uses” among the reasons for creating the district in the first place.

Local transportation advocacy groups, including Cascade, Seattle Streets Alliance, Transportation Choice Coalition and Futurewise, plus Lime, sent a letter to the preservation board this week urging them to approve the new corrals. The board is expected to take up the proposal again at its meeting on April 1.

 

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Transportation

Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.

More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.

City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.

Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)

Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”

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The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.

Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.

Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.

After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.

There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.

Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”

Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.

“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”

City Council, Transportation

Saka: People Who Support Keeping “Curby” Are Anti-Immigrant, Radical “Defund the Police” Carpetbaggers

By Erica C. Barnett

In a 2,100-word, emoji-filled email blast (that’s about three times the length of this post!) announcing a compromise that will keep a traffic safety divider in place while allowing cars to park in the bus lane on Delridge Way SW, City Councilmember Rob Saka blamed a “radical proxy ‘war on cars'” for demonizing his efforts to remove the divider. The barrier, a standard-issue hardened centerline identical to hundreds installed around the city, was installed as part of Metro’s RapidRide H project.

As PubliCola reported exclusively in 2023, Saka wanted to remove a standard eight-inch divider that prevents drivers from making illegal left turns across two lanes of car traffic, a bus lane, and a sidewalk into the parking lot of the daycare his kids attended, the Refugee and Immigrant Family Center. Saka, who was a corporate attorney for Meta when he sent a series of increasingly heated emails Seattle Department of Transportation employees in 2021 and 2022, complained that the hardened centerline was “triggering” and “severely traumatizing” to immigrants who “have faced significant trauma during their perilous journeys, including by navigating divisive structures and barriers designed to exclude lives in the US.”

Saka has consistently portrayed the lack of left-turn car access into the small preschool as an issue of racial and social justice, and his newsletter doubles down on that canard, accusing people who oppose eliminating the divider of “targeting the very immigrant families they claim to support” by denying cars from turning left into the parking lot.

In Saka’s version of reality, “radical” “anti-car ideologues” from other parts of the city are the only ones who opposed his proposal to remove the traffic-safety divider. These extremists, Saka wrote, would “rather villainize and punish drivers than support real multimodal safety. Local anti-car, anti-mode choice activists have attempted to make this project a rallying cry for direct action against transportation options that involve cars. I reject the false choice. This project has always been about safety for everyone — bikes, buses, pedestrians, and yes, cars. That’s the Seattle I believe in — coexistence over culture wars.”

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Saka did not identify who, precisely, is against “mode choice” or how preventing left turns into one preschool parking lot prevents people from driving cars.

On a roll, Saka accused the “activists” who opposed his $2 million folly of supporting Trump’s anti- immigrant policies and being connected to the “Defund the Police” movement, accusing these unidentified adversaries of “White Saviorism” and saying that he sees through their “insulting and revealing” opposition to the barrier’s removal “[a]s a Black man, son of immigrants, and survivor of poverty and foster care.”

It’s a striking escalation in Saka’s rhetorical battle against supporters of a project that was, again, built by the Seattle Department of Transportation to support safety for residents of West Seattle who use the new bus lane and improved sidewalk, along with a new bike lane across the street.

“Seattle loves to call itself pro-immigrant, yet some of the loudest ‘progressives’ opposing this project are targeting the very immigrant families they claim to support,” Saka wrote. “Why the outrage and sudden personal vendettas here? Why do some seem paralyzingly focused, even hellbent, on strictly policing and enforcing the desired traffic patterns and left turns by immigrants in a narrow 140-foot stretch in Delridge—but nowhere else in our 84-square-mile city?”

At the risk of repetition, the city of Seattle has installed hundreds of these hardened centerlines around the city, including in wealthy neighborhoods; to my knowledge, the one on Delridge is the only one that has been the subject of a high-profile campaign to remove it, which is why the opposition emerged. In Ballard, the city recently upgraded an identical (but much longer) hardened centerline on 15th Ave. NW to a broad median with street plantings, preventing people from driving over the curbs to turn left into oncoming traffic.

Saka continued, accusing safety advocates of actively “harassing” immigrants, effectively allying with Trump and his deportation agenda.

“Amid a resurgent Trump agenda threatening immigrant rights, we should be uniting to protect—not harass—these communities. As the son of a Nigerian immigrant, I see through the hypocrisy — and so do the families and workers affected. Real immigrant justice means backing up words with action.”

Saka even went so far as to connect support for the fully vetted, constructed safety project to the so-called “Defund movement,” saying that while “local immigrant families, other working families, small businesses, workers, and nonprofits in the area” support tearing out the divider, the opposition has come “[m]ostly from activists outside Delridge, and many outside West Seattle — many of whom pushed failed “defund” policies — now trying to block a safety project that helps communities they claim to support but don’t actually live in. The hypocrisy speaks volumes.”

Saka does not include any evidence that opponents of removing the safety barrier are from outside his district; that they oppose immigrants; or that they supported defunding the police.

The compromise the city reached with Saka will create a new detour around the curb, making it more convenient for drivers to access the preschool parking lot. It will also include new signs letting drivers know they can park in the dedicated bus lane during off-peak hours—restricting the lane’s intended use as public transit for people who live in Saka’s district but don’t own cars or choose not to drive.

City Council, Elections, King County, Transportation

County Council Gives Itself a Little ($315,000) Gift; Saka’s Effort to Divert Traffic Safety Funds to Sidewalks Fails

1. CORRECTION: The original version of this story suggested that Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, who did not respond to our initial request for comment for this story, had used his additional funds to pay for a mailer to his constituents. This was inaccurate—Zahilay did not use the funds for the mailer. We regret the error. 

All nine King County Councilmembers got an unexpected gift last month: a $35,000 add to each of their district budgets, to be spent any way they want.

The one-time funds, allocated by verbal agreement in an obscure (and non-televised) meeting chaired by County Council Chair Girmay Zahilay, was originally going to be a loan to each office, payable next year, but the four members of the committee agreed that requiring repayment in a tight budget year might put councilmembers in a tight position next year. (The county is facing a $160 million two-year budget deficit).

Instead, the committee opted to use “underspend” from last year’s central administrative budget, which totaled about $1 million, to pay for the one-time $315,000 add. Underspent funds become available in the next budget year.

Balducci opted out of the money, saying her office did not have a deficit.

In an email to Zahilay late last month, Balducci wrote, “I want to go on record as saying I don’t think we should do this. I believe it is bad practice and possibly borderline unethical…. It is a bad look for the council to lard up our own budgets this way, especially as I am hearing this additional funding is possibly being used for public communications from offices whose members are up for election.”

2. City Councilmember (and transportation committee chair) Rob Saka tried unsuccessfully to redirect future revenues from new speeding cameras toward new sidewalks, rather than the Automated Traffic Camera Fund, which is slated to receive 20 percent of the revenues from five new 24/7 speed enforcement cameras across the city. (The rest will go into the city’s general fund). Saka’s proposal would have reduced funding for traffic safety programs by 25 percent.

The state legislature adopted new regulations on automated traffic cameras last year, including a change to allow civilian police department employees, rather than just sworn officers, to review traffic camera tickets.

During public comment, several traffic safety advocates asked the council not to divert funding for sidewalks. “The reality is that pedestrians in Seattle, by and large, are not dying because of a lack of sidewalks,” pedestrian and bike advocate Ethan Campbell said. “They’re getting injured and killed while trying to cross roadways designed for high speeds,” like an 83-year-old woman who was struck and killed by a driver who fled the scene in SoDo earlier this week.

The money in the traffic safety fund would pay for safety projects, including improvements that “support equitable access and mobility for persons with disabilities; transportation projects designed to reduce vehicle speeds; and pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver education campaigns.” Saka’s amendment would have also routed 15 percent of revenues from red-light cameras to sidewalks by reducing the amount that goes to traffic safety projects by 25 percent (from 20 to 15 percent) and cutting the amount of red light camera revenues that go into the general fund.

Saka had more success with an amendment asking the Seattle Department of Transportation to “review and evaluate” a specific list of 10 locations as possible sites for the five new speeding cameras. The list is a familiar one: It consists of places where people tend to race their cars late at night. In the past, Saka told SDOT representatives that there was no need for them to come up with their own list of locations for speed cameras, because the council had already did their work for them by making the list of racing sites.

In reality, the 2024 state law requires cities to do an equity analysis before siting traffic cameras; that analysis has to “show a demonstrated need for traffic cameras based on rates of collision, reports of near collisions, travel by vulnerable roadway users, evidence of vehicles speeding, and anticipated or actual ineffectiveness or infeasibility of other mitigation measures.”

Most of the locations on Saka’s list, notably, are not on the city’s own Vision Zero High-Injury Network.

City Council, King County, public safety, Transportation

Shannon Braddock Appointed Acting County Executive; Saka Says He Opposed Traffic Diverters In His Neighborhood Because of Equity Concerns

1. On Tuesday, the King County Council unanimously appointed Shannon Braddock as acting King County Executive; previously, Braddock was deputy county executive to Dow Constantine, who took a new job this month as CEO of Sound Transit. Braddock previously worked at the county for 15 years, starting as chief of staff to former councilmember Joe McDermott; she also ran unsuccessfully for Seattle City Council in 2015 and for state senate in 2018.

Braddock will be the first female county executive in King County history. At yesterday’s meeting, several male council members praised Braddock without mentioning this historic fact—including two who did mention Braddock’s father, former state legislator Dennis Braddock, saying he should be proud. It fell to Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda to note that Braddock’s appointment marked “a big moment for our county.”

Councilmember Claudia Balducci called Braddock’s appointment “a milestone that should be and will be celebrated,” and asked the council to move quickly to appoint Braddock not just acting but full county executive through November, when a new county executive will take office, “so that we get the stability and the value of the complete and total confidence that we have in Shannon through November.” (As acting executive, Braddock can be removed and replaced at any time.)

When Balducci asked what the process would be to vote on Braddock’s appointment through November, council chair Girmay Zahilay abruptly called the council into a closed-door executive session, and the meeting ended without a clear answer on whether the council will appoint Braddock permanently or go through a second, separate process, potentially considering other candidates. Balducci said she plans to introduce legislation to appoint Braddock as full county executive at the council’s next meeting on April 15.

Balducci and Zahilay are running against each other for county executive; a third candidate, county assessor John Arthur Wilson, is also running.

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2. When he isn’t denouncing the words of people who left the council years ago, Rob Saka is head of the Seattle City Council’s transportation committee, which got a briefing from the Seattle Department of Transportation Tuesday about the city’s efforts to deploy new automated traffic enforcement cameras in school zones and to site five new full-time automated speed enforcement cameras.

After SDOT staffers laid out their plans to pick the best locations for the speed cameras by studying safety and equity issues at potential camera sites, Saka raised an objection: The city council, he said, had already decided where the new cameras should go. “So, Alki-Harbor Avenue, Magnuson Park, Golden Gardens, and probably Belltown,” Saka said. “So, boom! There’s four for you… We took care of the siting for ya.” That, an SDOT staffer noted quickly, is not how the process works; the state law authorizing automated traffic cameras requires an equity and safety analysis, and that—not vibes or the volume of neighborhood complaints—becomes the basis for placing the new cameras around the city.

Before the camera discussion began, Saka took a few minutes to respond to a public commenter who called out Saka’s opposition, as a neighborhood resident, to two proposed traffic diverters that would prevent people from cutting across the 26th Avenue SW greenway in the North Delridge neighborhood. The commenter, who identified himself as Max, noted that the diverter was supposed to reduce cut-through car traffic on 26th, the main cycling route in the area after SDOT canceled a planned northbound bike lane on Delridge. The diverter was canceled after residents objected that it would slow down car traffic, among other complaints.

Saka said his opposition to this and other traffic calming measures was a matter of “equity” because North Delridge is a “food desert” and the dividers, at SW Brandon and SW Genesee, would have prevented people from accessing “fresh food” in the neighborhood.

“It makes no sense,” Saka said. “It’s a head scratcher, in my view, to install a traffic diverter and prevent left-hand turns in a food desert, rendering Delridge the only single point of access to any fresh foods [or ] vegetables whatsoever. … It doesn’t make a lot of sense, from my perspective, to install such a drastic, draconian measure that has a a significant impact on neighborhoods and communities.”

This is hardly the first time Saka has raised “equity” objections to projects designed to protect vulnerable road users. In 2023, PubliCola reported on Saka’s fervid opposition to another traffic-safety divider, installed as part of a major transit upgrade on Delridge and also intended to protect cyclists and pedestrians. Saka compared the 8-inch divider, which prevents illegal left turns into the parking lot of the preschool his children attended, to Trump’s border wall, and set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove it.

Elections, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Police, Transportation

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Katie Wilson

“Harrell’s the status quo, and it’s not working,” Transit Riders Union leader Wilson says.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been in office for 16 of the last 18 years. Katie Wilson, general secretary of the Transit Riders Union, says he represents a “status quo” that isn’t working for the city.

Wilson is a longtime advocate for progressive causes. She played a central role in many successful local organizing efforts, including efforts to raise the minimum wage in Seattle and several suburban cities (most recently in Burien, whose leaders are so mad about the higher minimum that they’re suing Wilson and the Raise the Wage Burien campaign to overturn it.) She served on the city’s progressive revenue task force, which recommended a number of options for progressive new fees and taxes, including the local capital gains tax Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed last year. And she has been a prominent local voice on renters’ rights, fighting for key tenant protections inside and outside Seattle as part of the Stay Housed Stay Healthy Campaign.

As a progressive activist who’s never run for office before, Wilson acknowledges she’s well outside the Seattle establishment. But she says this year’s election—in which Proposition 1A, a funding measure backed by social housing advocates, roundly defeated a tepid alternative backed by Harrell—shows that Seattle supports social housing and wants it to work. When Wilson and I spoke earlier this week, I started by following up on an earlier conversation about how this year’s victory for social housing inspired her to run.

PubliCola (ECB): When we talked before, you said you were inspired by the success of Prop 1A and that that was a factor in your decision to run. Can you say more about that – what does social housing’s victory say about Seattle voters’ willingness to elect a more progressive mayor?

Katie Wilson (KW): I think what it really shows is just how out of step the current mayor is with the people who he’s supposed to represent. Prop 1A won in a landslide and Harrell is the face of the opposition campaign that was funded by the Chamber of Commerce.

It shows that the voters want action on affordable housing, and that’s what I want to see. We need people who are going to stand up and work for the city and not just obey corporate backers. Everyone got mailers in their mailboxes with Harrell’s face plastered on them that were funded by Amazon and Microsoft and the Chamber, and I think voters are smart and can see through that, and it shows that voters are eager for big action on affordable housing.

ECB: What kind of action would you take on affordable housing if you were mayor right now, including social housing?

KW: If we had a mayor right now who wanted to see the social housing developer work, there are very easy things he could be doing. He could make sure social housing gets the same density bonuses in the comprehensive plan that other types of affordable housing are getting. I think we need to go big. Councilmember Zahilay has proposed a billion-dollar bond for social housing. I would like to explore how we can do one of those at the city level. We would need some research into bonding capacity and mechanisms by which it could be paid back with rents.

We’re seeing discussions going on now around the comprehensive plan, and some decisions will be made this year. I think we need more housing almost everywhere, especially in great neighborhoods that already have parks and schools and grocery stores and small businesses, and I think adding more people more residents to those neighborhoods will make them even more vibrant.. And I think we need to have a strong anti-displacement approach, especially in neighborhoods like the Central District and South Seattle that have already been impacted by displacement to make sure that people who brought their homes years and years ago are able to pay their property taxes so they’re not displaced.

Seattle now is a city of 56 percent renter households and it’s rough out there. I think there are ways that we can strengthen our renter protection laws—like clamping down on rental junk fees, deceptive practices, and algorithmic pricing.

ECB: The council that voters elected in 2023 is, safe to say, considerably more conservative than you are on many issues. How would you bridge that political gap to work with a council that may not agree with you on the best goals or policies for the city?

KW: Obviously we’re not going to agree on everything, and there may be things that I couldn’t get done because of that. I do think that we want some of the same things, like seriously addressing homelessness and public safety. I think there’s a way to get beyond ideology and have a fact-based, evidence-based conversation about what actually works. I think it’s very important to have honest differences of opinion in public and work together behind the scenes.

In the moment we’re in, we need to be prepared for whatever is coming down from the federal level over the next few years—whether it’s attacks on civil rights, budget cuts, or other things that harm Seattle residents. And I don’t think our current mayor has a plan. One piece of this is new progressive revenue. The last city budget cycle was hard, and the only reason we didn’t see truly devastating cuts to public services was the JumpStart progressive revenue tax, which I played a key role in passing in 2020—coincidentally, one of the two years in the past 16 that Harrell hasn’t been in office.

As mayor, I will work to pass progressive revenue to make sure we do not go into a financial death spiral. I was on the progressive revenue task force, which came out with a list of options, which are not all shovel-ready. Unfortunately, the mayor has shelved that. We need to pick it back up and have a long-term, short-term and medium-term plan for revenue, especially if we’re going into a recession.

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ECB: In your recent piece about what the left has gotten wrong on homelessness, you talked about how people on the left need to acknowledge that some unhoused people cause visible disorder and other problems because of mental illness and drug addiction. Beyond acknowledging it, what will you propose doing to address unhoused people with addiction and mental illness, who tend to face the most barriers to stable housing?

KW: We know what works, we have models that have been pioneered here in Seattle that are proven to help get people off the streets, and what we’re lacking is the political will to scale those solutions up.

I think what we’re seeing from the current administration is a tendency toward cheaper Band-Aid solutions that don’t actually work, and that’s why we have twice as many people sleeping on the street as  New York City, which is mind-boggling.

We have an excess of studios right now. I think we need to put people into those studios. I’m not suggesting something like a rapid rehousing voucher, where after six months someone is homeless again. It would still be time-limited, but maybe more like five years. A lot of the homeless population just needs a home. I also think we need to do rapid acquisition of buildings with intensive case management and wraparound services for people who are cycling through the criminal justice system system. We need to have strategies for both those sections of the population and we need to prioritize them using both existing resources and new revenue.

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