Tag: SDOT

City Council, Elections, Equity, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

Final $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy Saves Equity-Based Projects Committee Chair Saka Derided as “Slush Fund”
Little Brook Street Mural in Lake City, a Lake City Collective project funded by SDOT’s Neighborhood Street Fund

The council also decided not to fund a controversial Burke-Gilman Trail alternative and to hold off on studying impact fees on new apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s transportation levy committee, which includes all nine council members, approved a $1.55 billion transportation levy package on Tuesday, one of the final steps before the levy heads to the November ballot.

Progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales didn’t manage to pass her proposal to add $150 million to the levy for sidewalks, arterial paving, and other projects, but she did score a significant victory: Her amendment to restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated safety partnership program, a revamp of the Neighborhood Street Fund designed to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities, passed 4-3 after two of the nine council members, Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera, abstained.

Morales’ amendment also zeroed out a proposed $14 million “district fund” that would have empowered council members to direct the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build specific projects in their districts. The proposed levy still funds Councilmember Rob Saka’s new “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs,” which Saka said could be used to fund various types of “smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities” that emerge in the future.

Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed confusion about this late addition, wondering aloud how it was different from the neighborhood-initiated projects, which came out of the work of a task force focused on creating more equitable access to small-scale transportation funding. Saka responded by saying the new fund would be a kind of catch-all for many types of projects. “The idea is that it could be for neighborhood-initiated safety [or] it could be for the district projects fund,” Saka said. “You can call whatever you want, whatever bucket or subcategory you so choose, but broadly what it is, it’s all the same thing. It’s smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities.”

The neighborhood-initiated projects initiative, an equity-focused revamp of the popular Neighborhood Street Fund, has proved surprisingly controversial. (On Tuesday, several council members groused that most of the money would probably just end up in Morales’ Southeast Seattle district, the most diverse in the city.) The basic idea is that SDOT, with the help of its equity work group, would reach out to historically marginalized communities without a history of applying for or receiving transportation grants and work with them to develop small-scale projects.

Saka, who previously refused to hear a presentation on SDOT’s strategy for incorporating equity into the levy, derisively called the entire program a “slush fund” while cross-examining SDOT director Greg Spotts about whether the program would really do anything new.

“In the absence of this slush fund, does SDOT not undertake any of that work, currently, now?” Saka asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as a slush fund whatsoever,” Spotts responded.

“Does SDOT engage—so, characterize it however you want—does SDOT not engage in this underlying work you’re talking about now?” Saka said.

“This program is proposed by the executive to supplement previous waves of investment and make investment in a new way, to bring people into the circle of power who previously have not felt included.,” Spotts said.

Morales’ amendment restores all but $1.5 million of the $41 million Harrell initially proposed for the program.

An amendment from Councilmember Dan Strauss that would take $20 million away from a proposed arterial road maintenance program and spend it building the controversial Leary Way alternative for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard failed on a 5-4 vote. S

trauss has been a vocal advocate for the Leary option, a dog-leg detour preferred by industrial businesses who have spent decades fighting against a direct route connecting the two long-finished segments of the trail through Ballard. In hyping his amendment, Strauss derided the option long preferred by cyclists—a direct connection between the two incomplete segments of the existing path—as “a narrow strip of asphalt through an industrial area without a sidewalk.”

Another Strauss proposal to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. NW into a more pedestrian-friendly “curbless street” failed 8-1.

A proposal from Councilmember Cathy Moore to study transportation impact fees on new housing to pay for sidewalks also failed. Last year, the council considered, and ultimately rejected, legislation that would have amended the city’s comprehensive plan to allow the city to charge the fees, which are based on the premise that dense, urban living causes negative impacts on the city’s transportation system.

Sara Nelson, who joined last year’s narrow majority in defeating the impact fee proposal, said that because transportation fees would still require amending the comp plan, the council should consider them as part of the “big, long discussion and legislation on the comp plan update this coming year.” Mayor Bruce Harrell released his proposed update to the comprehensive plan earlier this year. “We’ve had developers, yes, weigh in on this. We’ve also had affordable housing providers weigh in in opposition to transportation impact fees, and so it’s clearly a discussion that merits a lot of sort of complex thinking,” Nelson said.

The final version of the levy proposal, which would cost the median Seattle homeowner around $45 a month, heads to the full council for approval next week.

homelessness, housing, human services, King County, labor, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Police, Transportation

Afternoon Fizz: Sheriff Fires Deputy, New Director Lays Out Plans for Homelessness Authority, City Reinstates 72-Hour Parking Rule
King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Marc Dones

1. King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht will fire a detective for failing to follow basic de-escalation policies and for “extremely poor tactical and officer safety decisions” before fatally shooting a car theft suspect near Enumclaw in 2019.

Detective George Alvarez is a 21-year veteran of the sheriff’s office with a lengthy use-of-force record, including five shootings and a criminal charge for assaulting and threatening an informant in 2003. In November 2019, Alvarez and his partner, Detective Josh Lerum, were driving an unmarked car when they spotted 36-year-old Anthony Chilcott, wanted for stealing an SUV and a pet poodle, driving in rural southeastern King County. Earlier that day, Chilcott had evaded a Washington State Patrol officer, but when the detectives found him, he had parked next to a power station to smoke a cigarette. At the time, Johanknecht wrote, “there was no imminent risk” to members of the public.

Nevertheless, without consulting with Lerum or waiting for backup, Alvarez decided to pull within inches of Chilcott’s driver’s-side door, sparking a confrontation that ended with both detectives shooting Chilcott in the head. Neither detective was wearing a sheriff’s uniform, and witnesses at a bus stop nearby told investigators that they didn’t initially realize that the pair that rammed the stolen SUV across the road and broke the driver’s-side window with a sledgehammer and the butts of their handguns were police officers.

In a letter to Alvarez explaining her decision, Johanknecht emphasized that she did not decide to fire him for the shooting itself, but for his decisions that led up to the shooting. “You did not use the opportunity you had to slow things down,” Johanknecht wrote. “The urgency here was created by your actions, not the actions of the suspect.” Johanknecht and other department leadership also called into question Alvarez’s claims that Chilcott posed an “immediate danger” to witnesses at a bus stop nearby. Instead, Johanknecht argued that Alvarez’s actions had placed bystanders—and Lerum—in danger by sparking an unnecessary confrontation with Chilcott.

For his part, Lerum received a written reprimand for not wearing his ballistic vest or clothing identifying himself as a law enforcement officer during the encounter.

In a press release on Thursday, King County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Sergeant Tim Meyer drew a parallel between Chilcott’s death and the failed sting operation in 2017 during which plainclothes sheriff’s deputies shot and killed 17-year-old Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens on a residential street in Des Moines. King County agreed to pay a $2.25 million settlement to Dunlap-Gittens’ family in May 2020; however, according to Meyer, Alvarez is the first officer whom Johanknecht has fired for misuse of force or failure to de-escalate since taking office in 2017.

Cooper Offenbecker, an attorney representing Alvarez, told the Seattle Times that his client intends to appeal Johanknecht’s decision.

According to Rachel Schulkin, a spokeswoman for Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office, the city “will not immediately resume issuing citations starting April 1 and will instead have a grace period in which we remind the public about the parking rules.”

2. In a media availability this week, new King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Marc Dones said they intended to “allow for regional variations” in how various parts of King County respond to homelessness, giving the example of a “mega-shelter in Black Diamond” as something that “would not make sense” as part of a regional response. “I don’t see this job as being about running roughshod or issuing policy fiats; it will be about building things together,” they said.

However, Dones added, they are not interested in promoting the narrative that Seattle is somehow producing homelessness or generating the region’s homeless population; cities are natural “draws” for people experiencing homelessness in nearby areas, they said and “there is a natural pull to where there are services. We see this in jurisdictions across the country—people go where they think they can get the help they need.” Continue reading “Afternoon Fizz: Sheriff Fires Deputy, New Director Lays Out Plans for Homelessness Authority, City Reinstates 72-Hour Parking Rule” →

Mayor Durkan, Transportation

Where Is Durkan’s $195,000 Cabinet-Level General? “Out and About,” According to His Schedule

When Mayor Jenny Durkan decided to hire retired Air Force general Mike Worden as a special, cabinet-level “director of mobility operations coordination,” she explained the move as a way of freeing up Seattle Department of Transportation director Sam Zimbabwe to focus on the day-to-day operations at SDOT while Worden dealt with crisis management. (Worden, whose most recent job was for defense contractor Lockheed Martin, was a runner-up for the SDOT director position, and his $195,000 salary is funded at least partially through SDOT.)

Worden, the mayor said, would “coordinate across all departments” to respond to emergencies that impact transportation; for example, “When a tree comes down and blocks a road, that’s not necessarily a Seattle Department of Transportation issue; it could be a City Light issue because it could take wires with it. It could be a Parks Department issue, because the tree was originally in a park.”

At the time, the city was dealing with the closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which many officials thought would result in nightmarish traffic jams. The city opened its joint operations center—essentially, an emergency traffic management center staffed 24 hours a day—to respond to the coming “period of maximum constraint” downtown. When that “carpocalypse” (predictably) failed to occur, Worden was assigned to more, ahem, general duties. (As I reported earlier this year, city staffers were initially instructed to refer to Worden as “the General” or “General Worden,” a directive that was reportedly later rescinded).

But what, exactly, are those duties? Worden has been one of the least visible members of the mayor’s administration, rarely appearing at press events and taking a back seat at major announcements; at the mayor’s recent housing speech, for example, he stood in the back of the room and left immediately after Durkan concluded her remarks.

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I asked the mayor’s office for a copy of Worden’s schedule, starting in March of this year—after the fears of Viadoom had mostly subsided.

The first thing that jumps out about the schedule is the large number of the pages in Worden’s schedule that are largely blank—unusual for a mayoral cabinet member.

The second obvious departure from a traditional high-ranking city employee’s schedule is that a huge amount of Worden’s time is unprogrammed “out and about” time. “Out and about,” in fact, makes up the largest category of time in Worden’s schedule other than unprogrammed time represented as blank spaces in the calendar—in the 85 work days represented in his March, April, May, and June calendars, 285 hours—or the equivalent of nearly 36 full eight-hour work days—is earmarked as “out and about.” Twelve more weekdays are blocked out as “DNS [do not schedule]—will attend cabinet or mayoral meetings.” 

Here are a few pages from Worden’s schedule (full calendar here). Below them is the schedule for SDOT director Sam Zimbabwe for those same days.

Asked about Worden’s current duties, Durkan spokeswoman Chelsea Kellogg said he’s focused on “implementing citywide process improvements to better address traffic incidents” like the fish truck spill in 2015, which took place under the previous administration and eventually led to 30 recommendations for improving traffic incident management. “Director Worden manages the Traffic Incident Management and Congestion Management program, which is a cross-department, City-wide coordination effort,” Kellogg said. “This work is happening in coordination with the regional Seattle Area Congestion Management Joint Operations Working Group to implement region-wide process improvements.”

As for all that “out and about time,” Kellogg said: “During that time Mike rides buses, light rail, or the [S]ounder to talk to transit drivers and riders.” (Sounder and light rail are run by Sound Transit, not the city; the buses are run by King County Metro). “Sometimes Mike goes to traffic pinch points or other points of observation to watch traffic, incident responses, traffic clearing, traffic officers, etc.  When there is an incident, Director Worden often goes to see response in person, sometimes hitching a ride with a responder. If required, Director Worden corrects response protocols on the spot unless there is a serious unresolved trend which needs to be elevated.”

Referring to the unscheduled stretches in Worden’s calendar, I asked Kellogg whether I was “missing things that are happening that are not explicitly on the schedule,” and for examples. Kellogg responded: “To your question about his day-to-day responsibilities outside of City projects, that would be reflected in the regular working time not taken up by meetings.”

“Each member of cabinet has different responsibilities. Some cabinet members manage large teams of people and huge departments; some do not. We believe it valuable to have a cabinet member like Director Worden who can focus on and elevate the cross-departmental work of departments on incident management and congestion management,” Kellogg said.

Affordability, City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Transportation

Afternoon Crank: Bike Lanes and Backyard Cottages
A backyard cottage in Ballard
Image via City of Seattle.

1. City council member Abel Pacheco, who is filling out former District 4 representative Rob Johnson’s term,  did some political calculus before deciding to seek the temporary appointment rather than staying in the crowded race for a four-year term, but urbanists are probably wishing they could have him longer.

Yesterday, Pacheco was instrumental in shooting down two amendments from council member Lisa Herbold that would have, respectively, barred homeowners who build accessory dwelling units (such as a basement apartment) from renting them out on a short-term basis through a platform like Airbnb, and required a homeowner to live on the property for at least a year before building a second accessory unit (such as a backyard cottage.)

Herbold said banning Airbnbs in ADUs would prevent the construction of ADUs for the purpose of providing short-term rentals rather than as “rental housing” for Seattle residents. Pacheco countered that in his district (which includes the University of Washington and Children’s Hospital) a high percentage of renters only need housing during the school year or a short-term residency, and that Herbold’s amendment would make it impossible for them to rent their units during off seasons. (City law limits Airbnb operators to two units—one inside their primary residence and one offsite).

“Having lived in two ADUs, I know how great an opportunity it is to provide for folks not just in my district but around the city,” Pacheco said. Mike O’Brien, who sponsored the legislation and has shepherded it through the council through years of legal challenges, added that if Herbold’s amendment passed, it would put ADUs in a separate category from all other types of rentals, so that someone who owned two houses side by side could rent out the second house as a short-term rental, but someone who owned a house and built a garage apartment on the same lot could not. “I don’t think that’s necessarily fair,” O’Brien said.

The legislation, which passed out of committee 5-0 (council member Kshama Sawant, who might have voted with Herbold on her amendments, was excused to go to a labor rally), will move forward to the full council on Monday, July 1.

“We don’t have constructable plans [for a two-way Fourth Ave. bike lane] right now.” — SDOT director Sam Zimbabwe

2. Pacheco also asked some blunt questions of Seattle Department of Transportation director Sam Zimbabwe during a committee discussion about the diminished Bicycle Master Plan, which SDOT is now describing as an “accountability document” that only promises what the city can actually pay for. (The bike plan was scaled back in response to higher cost estimates on a number of projects that were supposed to be funded by the Move Seattle Levy. After bike advocates protested that the bulk of the projects that got cut were top-priority projects in Southeast Seattle and downtown, SDOT updated the plan by putting some of those projects back in as areas for “study,” while also scaling back a long-planned, and already delayed, protected bike lane on Fourth Ave. downtown). Pacheco asked Zimbabwe why the latest version of the Fourth Avenue bike lane is only northbound, rather than the two-way bike lane that has been in every previous version of the plan.

Zimbabwe said that SDOT has every intention of “designing a two-way facility, but the traffic impacts of that, and frankly the costs of that, have never been fully studied,” including the cost of signal infrastructure to allow left-hand turns across the bike lanes from Fourth Avenue. “That wasn’t part of the planning process previously,” he said. “We are committed to designing [it] to better understand what the cost implications are.”

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After the meeting, I asked Zimbabwe how it was possible that there was no design yet for Fourth Ave., given that it was originally supposed to open at the beginning of 2018. He said that his understanding was that the two-way bike lane was “designed to about 30 percent [without] a full budget development. … We don’t have constructable plans right now.” SDOT’s previous reasons for delaying the two-way bike lane have included costs, impacts on transit during the “period of maximum constraint” downtown, traffic impacts during major traffic incidents such as when a fish truck overturned on SR 99 in 2015, and (most recently) “parking impacts.”

I also asked Zimbabwe about whether SDOT planned to revisit its decision to eliminate another long-planned bike lane on 35th Ave. NE in light of two recent collisions between drivers and vulnerable users (a cyclist and a motorcyclist, who was killed by a driver in a pickup truck turning left into his path). On Monday, as I first reported on Twitter, council member Sally Bagshaw said she was horrified by videos showing drivers zooming past cyclists at close range, using a newly added turn lane as a passing lane.

Zimbabwe said there were no plans to revive the protected bike lane—which was included in earlier versions of the Bike Master Plan but killed by Mayor Jenny Durkan after “concerns … from the community” —but that SDOT was “making some tweaks to make sure pedestrian crossings are safe” and adding flexible barriers to create “turn pockets at the intersections to keep [drivers] from overtaking” cyclists. In a statement to KING 5, SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergserson said that the upcoming changes, “as well as any others, should not be viewed as an indication of shortcomings but as part of SDOT’s ongoing data-driven approach to roadway improvements.”

Mayor Durkan, Transportation

Reports: Bike Plan Update Adds Bike Lane, “Pre-Planning” in SE Seattle, Scales Back Delayed Fourth Avenue Bike Lane
The most recent version of the Bicycle Master Plan implementation plan included many gaps in Southeast Seattle’s bike network and eliminated miles of planned bike lanes in the southern half of the city.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Seattle Department of Transportation will release the latest version of the Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan, which outlines the bike projects the city plans to build and study through 2024, according to sources familiar with the latest version of the plan.

In response to community feedback urging the city to restore some of the cuts SDOT proposed to bike lanes in Southeast Seattle, the new plan will reportedly include a new mile-long bike lane along Martin Luther King Jr. Way S. between the Mount Baker light rail station and I-90, as well as “pre-planning” for a protected bike lane (PBL) along MLK to Southeast Seattle; a bike lane along Beacon Ave. from the Jose Rizal Bridge in the International District to 39th Ave. S. about five and a half miles away, and some sort of new connection between downtown and Georgetown (where heavy freight traffic along Airport Way has made putting a bike lane there a political and logistical challenge).

The new update will also reportedly scale back plans for a protected bike lane on Fourth Avenue—already delayed three years from the original 2018 opening date—by replacing the planned two-way protected lane on the east side of the street with a one-way (northbound) protected lane on the west side, where there is currently an unprotected one-way bike lane. SDOT justified delaying the bike lane last year by saying that it didn’t want to risk delaying transit along Fourth Avenue during the “period of maximum constraint,” when much of downtown is under construction. The two-way bike lane was rescheduled to open in 2021, once light rail trains begin running to Northgate.

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SDOT’s initial version of the implementation plan, which came out in March, eliminated miles of long-planned protected bike lanes , particularly in Southeast Seattle—the area of the city that the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board emphasized top priorities. (The mayor’s office asked the board to come up with a list of priority projects after SDOT announced that the city would not be able to complete all of the projects that had been funded in the Move Seattle levy last year.)

Although the bike board specifically identified Southeast Seattle as the area most lacking in safe bike connections to the rest of the city, the update eliminated a greenway on Beacon Ave. S and a protected bike lane on Rainier Ave. S., one of the deadliest street for cyclists and pedestrians in the city, leaving Southeast Seattle with what Seattle Neighborhood Greenways’ director Gordon Padelford called “a few scattered hilly segments” of bike lanes. SDOT, with assistance from the Department of Neighborhoods, held a series of neighborhood meetings where participants identified their top priorities; at the one I attended, in South Beacon Hill, residents said they were worried that Mayor Durkan and SDOT weren’t willing to risk political controversy to build safe, convenient bike connections between Southeast Seattle and downtown.

The proposals to begin “pre-planning” on some north-south streets seems like an acknowledgement of those concerns (as does the proposal to actually build a mile of bike lane between Mount Baker and I-90). As usual, though the proof will be in whether these bike lanes actually get built, or whether they end up gathering dust along with much of the original Bike Master Plan.

City Council, Mayor Durkan, Transportation

Durkan, SDOT Get an Earful from Advocates About Proposed Bike Plan Cuts

Dozens of bike safety advocates lined up in city council chambers this afternoon to express their frustration at a Bicycle Master Plan update from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Seattle Department of Transportation that eliminates dozens of projects, replaces planned protected bike lanes with neighborhood greenways on distant, often hilly, parallel streets, and gives especially short shrift to neighborhoods in Southeast Seattle, where two of the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board’s top-priority projects, on Rainier Ave. S and Beacon Ave. S, have been cut. Just prior to the meeting, the advocates held a rally and press conference in the lobby of City Hall, where council members Teresa Mosqueda and Mike O’Brien joined them in condemning the cuts.

Last year, SDOT announced significant cuts to many of the projects included in the $930 million Move Seattle levy, to reflect reduced federal funding and higher cost estimates for some projects.Meg Wade, from the climate action group 350 Seattle, talked about the abuse she has received from drivers as a queer cyclist and pedestrian. “I have been called a cunt; I have been called a bitch taking up too much space on the road; I have stepped into a crosswalk and asked a driver to move their car and been told ‘I am sick of you people’ I have been told ‘Fucking get out of my way.’ What this says is, it is okay for the harassment to continue.” Wade continued, her voice shaking: “It is astonishing to me that the mayor, who comes out of the gay community, would not understand that saying… ‘Go hide out of the public vision; get out of our public spaces’—that she wouldn’t understand the similarities” between anti-LGBT harassment and harassment of cyclists.

“Working-class people, middle-class people, families with little children, elderly individuals, community members—all of them have spoken [against the cuts]. When the mayor says it’s about community engagement, it’s about public feedback—well, whose feedback are you actually listening to?”

Immediately after Wade spoke, two cyclists, Apu Mishra and Tamara Schmautz, stood up to dramatically “mourn the loss” of three plans previously adopted by the city—the Bicycle Master Plan, the Climate Action Plan, and the Complete Streets—by destroying copies of each document in a hand-cranked portable shredder.

Members of the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board, including its current co-chair, Emily Paine, expressed dismay that the plan labeled 13 of the eliminated projects “SBAB removed,” implying that the bike board had recommended those projects for removal. Some of those projects, Paine said, were not only “not recommended by SBAB to be removed,” they “were actually given our highest endorsement,” including a protected bike lane on Beacon Hill and a PBL on Rainier Avenue South.

SDOT attempted to walk back the “SBAB removed” designation on Tuesday, calling it an inadvertent error and apologizing for the confusion. (SDOT traffic engineer Monica DeWald said, “We should have rephrased that to ‘SBAB prioritized but funding limited,’ just so we sent the message that it was still an SBAB top priority but we just didn’t have the funding.”) But agency staffers were undoubtedly aware that the list of cuts included some of the bike board’s top priorities when they came up with the list. In an email to bike board members and SDOT staff, including DeWald, from last November, SDOT senior transportation planner Serena Lehman compiled a list of the board’s top priorities, which included both the Beacon Avenue and Rainier Ave. bike lanes. SDOT has not elaborated on why these two top-priority projects have been cut other than to say that the city doesn’t have the money to build them.

Bike board members also expressed concern Tuesday that SDOT has designated about half of all the bike projects that are scheduled for completion between 2019 and 2024 projects as having high levels of “risk,” which they worried might provide cover to remove them from the plan.  “A pattern has emerged in this administration of delaying and eliminating bike lanes that prove challenging or controversial,” bike board member Patrick Taylor said. “When I look at the implementation plan, I see most of the projects listed as ‘risky,’ which in an administration that does not have the gumption to follow through with projects designated as challenging, I view as concerning.”

“Our perception on the Bike Advisory Board is that this administration does not care what we think, and that when we send letters, we might as well send them as a paper airplane.”

Council members, including O’Brien, committee chairman Rob Johnson, and Kshama Sawant, expressed frustration that the mayor had rolled the bike plan back so dramatically. Sawant, who has not historically been among the council’s most vocal bike advocates, was particularly vociferous, arguing that it was “meaningless” for SDOT staffers to tout the city’s progress on bike infrastructure “at the same time that the mayor’s office and SDOT leadership has dealt a significant blow to the whole plan. … Working-class people, middle-class people, families with little children, elderly individuals, community members—all of them have spoken [against the cuts], Sawant said. “So I don’t really understand. When the mayor … says it’s about community engagement, it’s about public feedback—well, whose feedback are you actually listening to?” Sawant’s comments were a rebuke to activists who helped defeat a long-planned protected bike lane on 35th Ave. NE, who argued that only “privileged” white people ride bikes or care about safe bike infrastructure.

Members of the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee hit on many of the same themes at their monthly meeting Tuesday night, and discussed issuing formal recommendations to the council in response to the scaled-back plan. Committee  member Joseph Laubach, who noted that the new plan delivers only about 60 percent of the miles of new bike lanes, trails, and greenways included in the original levy, called the new strategy “unfair” even in light of the Move Seattle “reset.” Taylor, who also sits on the Move Seattle committee, noted that the bike board prioritized projects in South Seattle neighborhoods like Beacon Hill and the Rainier Valley precisely because they connected those historically neglected neighborhoods to downtown. “All the projects that rose to the top of our list for extra emphasis are in Southeast Seattle… and those were the projects that disappeared without a trace,” he said. [Editor’s note: This paragraph initially said that the new plan eliminates 60 percent of the new bike lane-miles; in fact, it eliminates 40 percent and preserves 60 percent.]

Both O’Brien, who attended Tuesday night’s committee meeting, and Taylor, who noted that the bike board itself will discuss the new plan at its own meeting tomorrow night, urged the committee to consider making a formal recommendation to the council. “Our perception on the Bike Advisory Board is that this administration does not care what we think, and that when we send letters, we might as well send them as a paper airplane,” Taylor said. “Having this board’s letter as well might elevate [the concerns] to a higher level.”

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