By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, the city released a 22-page transportation levy renewal proposal that would bring in $1.3 billion to fund roads, bridges, and sidewalks over the next eight years, with $218 million for bridge maintenance, $109 million for sidewalks and pedestrian improvements, and $107 million on Vision Zero and school safety projects.
Adjusted for inflation and timeline (the new levy is eight years instead of nine), that’s about $33 more million a year than the Move Seattle levy that’s about to expire—hardly enough to maintain the status quo, much less invest in new initiatives, especially once construction cost inflation is factored in.
After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the levy last week, advocates for safer streets began pointing out inconsistencies between the city’s rhetoric about the proposal—which Harrell said “will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected” no matter how people get around—and what the levy would actually fund.
Although the graphics-heavy proposal is noticeably light on specifics, the balance of spending categories skews heavily toward car-oriented projects, including road repairs, new pavement “on our busiest streets,” and bridge maintenance, including upgrades and planning for the replacement of the Ballard and Magnolia Bridges.
Compared to the Move Seattle Levy, the new levy plan cuts spending on transit connections by 30 percent; cuts pedestrian projects, including new sidewalks, by 23 percent; and cuts spending on freight mobility by 45 percent, according to an analysis by Whose Streets? Our Streets! organizer Ethan Campbell. Spending on “climate and resiliency” projects is up 111 percent from the previous levy, but that category—as described in the levy proposal—focuses mostly on planting trees, expanding access to EV chargers, and increasing “low-emissions goods delivery in areas most impacted by climate change and pollution,” rather than shifting people away from cars. Vehicles account for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse-gas emissions in Seattle.
Advocates for safer streets say the levy also represents a capitulation on the city’s Vision Zero goal of reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030, which is within the timeline of the eight-year levy. In Seattle, as in many cities, traffic deaths—particularly pedestrian deaths—have been trending upward over the past several years, as the Seattle Department of Transportation acknowledged in its “Vision Zero Top-To-Bottom Review” last year.
“Seattle adopted Vision Zero … in 2015, and yet over 1,500 people have been seriously injured and over 200 have been killed since then,” Erica Bush, director of Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, said on Monday, at a press conference held by a coalition of advocates outside City Hall. “We will not see this trend change until we commit to completely reimagining the way we use our roadways.”
At the Monday press conference, safety advocates pushed for a levy of at least $1.7 billion, with at least half of the funding dedicated to street safety and mobility for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, noted that broken and missing sidewalks often force people who use wheelchairs, scooters, and walkers to “navigate the streets alongside cars,” putting their lives at risk.
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The levy proposes adding just 250 blocks of sidewalks and sidewalk alternatives, like curbless paved “walkways,” over eight years—about 2 percent of the 11,000 blocks that currently lack sidewalks. At that rate, advocates said, it will take the city at least 400 years to complete its sidewalk network. “In the same proposal that cuts pedestrian infrastructure, it also set an ambitious goal of filling every pothole in 72 hours,” Black said. “[The] transportation system that the mayor is proposing [is] one where we measure our response times to infrastructure for cars in hours, and our response to infrastructure for pedestrians in centuries.” Continue reading “Advocates Urge City to Adopt More Ambitious, Less Car-Centric Transportation Levy”