Tag: traffic

Bikes, Featured, Transportation

The Story Behind Those Ads on Rainier Instructing Pedestrians: “Don’t Blend In”
Image via SDOT/NONWHITEWORKS

When the billboards and bus-stop ads started appearing along Rainier Ave. South, pedestrian and bicycling safety advocates took notice. “Best place to wear neon: Rainier Ave. S,” the billboards blared. “Rainier Ave. S averages more crashes per day than anywhere else in Seattle.” “BE ALERT. BE AWARE. BE SAFE.”

The signs are visually striking, featuring real members of the Rainier Valley community—black and brown, young and old, gay and straight and trans—decked out in arresting neon colors as they strike poses and cross the street. The intent of the ad campaign, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation, was to “encourage and empower pedestrians and bicyclists to wear bright-colored clothing that stands out” to avoid being hit.

Hundreds of pedestrians are hit by drivers on Rainier Ave. S. every year, many of them trying to cross a street where you can walk almost half a mile without coming upon a signaled crosswalk—and dozens have been killed. No other street in Seattle is nearly as dangerous—Aurora Ave. N., the runner-up, has less than half the collisions per mile, a statistic that has held steady for years despite urgent calls for the city to take action.

Safe-streets advocates resented the implication that driver-pedestrian crashes on Rainier—a city street whose highway-like design contributes massively to speeding and collisions—were somehow the fault of the people being hit. 

“You do not need special clothes to walk around your neighborhood, and we should stand up against a public agency trying to say otherwise,” Seattle Bike Blog wrote. “And if someone wearing a black jacket is hit while crossing a street with a long history of speeding and collisions, that person’s fashion choice is not the problem. The street with a long history of speeding and collisions is the problem.”

“I’m not sure that’s the way I would have started [a safety campaign] if it had been up to me. But if that’s the mandate, getting folks in the community to be sharing this message of their own volition is the most effective way to message.” —Natasha Marin, NONWHITEWORKS

Ethan Bergerson, a spokesman with SDOT, says the campaign wasn’t just billboards—it also included a series of community events featuring messages about safe driving habits (along with an art project aimed at getting kids to stop staring at their phones while crossing the street). As for the billboards, he said they came out of a process of “community engagement” with “historically underrepresented communities who live near Rainier Valley. This engagement effort resulted in the advertisement you inquired about.”

But Natasha Marin, the anti-racism marketing consultant whose firm NONWHITEWORKS designed the ads and ran the outreach events, says the decision to target safety messaging at pedestrians, rather than drivers, was “SDOT’s call” and came long before she got involved in the project. When she suggested that the campaign might want to target people driving through the Rainier Valley, rather than the community members being hit and sometimes killed by those drivers, “the response I got back was, ‘No, we want to educate, not implicate.'”

“I’m not sure that’s the way I would have started [a safety campaign] if it had been up to me,” Marin says. “But if that’s the mandate, getting folks in the community to be sharing this message of their own volition is the most effective way to message. … Frankly, I don’t recall a time where I saw SDOT put up billboards on Rainier featuring black and POC and gay and trans people. That’s awesome, and definitely the direction we need to go in terms of visual marketing.”

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“I don’t know that everybody in Seattle realizes that Rainier Ave. S is the worst place to be” for pedestrians and cyclists, Marin says. “I think if that were more commonly known, probably it would affect people’s driving and attention spans.” Continue reading “The Story Behind Those Ads on Rainier Instructing Pedestrians: “Don’t Blend In”” →

Mayor Durkan, Seattle magazine, Transit, Transportation

Can We Toll Our Way Out of Congestion?

This story originally appeared in the print and online editions of Seattle magazine.

Downtown Seattle rush hour traffic
Image credit: Alex Crook, Seattle magazine

January 2020: The downtown Convention Center is under construction, kicking almost 600 buses out of the downtown transit tunnel and closing down the ramps that now give buses direct access to the Interstate 5 express lanes. Those buses now share city streets with more cars than ever, as hundreds of drivers divert to the street grid, avoiding the new Alaskan Way tunnel, which has a $2.50 toll (during nonpeak hours) and no downtown exits. Meanwhile, the old Alaskan Way Viaduct is still being demolished, KeyArena reconstruction is creating traffic chaos in South Lake Union, and a growing number of commuters are choosing Uber and Lyft over buses that are often off schedule or full, adding to congestion.

But what if there was a way to alleviate all this predicted chaos—a period the city refers to, drily, as the “period of maximum constraint”—without forcing people to get up at 4 a.m. to beat traffic, or work from home? Some city leaders, including Mayor Jenny Durkan, think they may have found a solution in a concept called congestion pricing. The idea is simple: Charge people to drive into the center city during the times when congestion is worst, and use the revenues to fund alternatives to driving, such as increased bus service. Voilà: fewer vehicles, faster transit, improved air quality (car and truck trips account for half of Seattle’s greenhouse gas emissions), and safer streets for bicyclists and pedestrians.

“Most people have already made the decision [not to commute downtown by car],” says City Council member Mike O’Brien, referring to the fact that the majority of those who work downtown don’t get there by driving alone. O’Brien, with the mayor, is leading the congestion-pricing charge. “For those who haven’t [decided], this will give you more options, and for those who want to keep driving, you can keep driving, and your commute’s going to be faster—it’s just going to cost you more.”

In practice, of course, it isn’t so simple. In 2017, the Seattle City Council authorized $200,000 for a study on the effects of tolling downtown streets—an idea that will require voter approval to move forward—as well as other options, such as taxing Uber and Lyft rides, that would not require a public vote. In September, Durkan released a budget that provides another $1 million for the city to study congestion-pricing options in more detail and to conduct outreach to community members and businesses, with the goal of implementing congestion pricing by 2021, when the mayor’s first term ends.

While tolling may be controversial—a 2015 poll by the Puget Sound Regional Council found that 54 percent of King County residents opposed the idea of universal highway tolls—Durkan pointed out that in other cities that have implemented tolling, such as London and Stockholm, “People who have to drive [found] that it’s actually more efficient and more effective” than the previous free-for-all system. However, Durkan warned that before the city puts a tolling plan on the ballot, “We have to engage people deeply…and make sure that it is paired up with meaningful transit, because we can’t ask people to get out of their single-occupancy vehicles until there are meaningful alternatives.”

Technologically, congestion tolling is pretty simple: The city would create a cordon of virtual checkpoints at the edges of the tolling area and charge drivers, using special car-mounted transponders, whenever they enter the area during the times when tolls are in effect. This is exactly the system most states, including Washington, already use to toll state highways, such as the State Route 520 bridge across Lake Washington.

Where it gets more complicated, according to Mark Hallenbeck, director of the University of Washington–affiliated Washington State Transportation Center, is when the city starts making choices about who to charge, and when, and where. If South Lake Union is included in the tolling area, should people who live on Queen Anne get a free pass because they need to go through the neighborhood to get to I-5? If some low-income workers have no choice but to drive downtown, should the city create a low-income or nighttime exemption to the pricing scheme? All of these choices have consequences, and costs.

“The question is really, what do they want to achieve and how will they design the system to achieve it,” Hallenbeck says. “Pricing is a wonderful mechanism, but you have to design the system correctly, and you have to understand where the pain points are and apply money to those pain points. And they have to be the pain points that matter.”

Currently, only about 25 percent of people who work downtown get to and from their jobs by driving alone. That number has declined steadily in recent years, according to the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), thanks to improved transit downtown and incentives for employees to commute by bike or bus, such as free transit passes and showers in office buildings. DSA CEO Jon Scholes points to this improvement as evidence that the “carrot” approach to reducing congestion can be as effective as the “stick.”

“It’s not clear to me what problem we’re trying to solve here,” Scholes says. “[Durkan’s announcement] feels a little divorced from any clear strategy or plan. The constraints we have are the need for more transit capacity—more buses are driving by full, and the light rail system is taking longer to build than anyone wants—and the need for more housing. Generally speaking, we think we should focus our efforts there,” not on tolls, Scholes says.

Other skeptics of congestion pricing have expressed concern that tolls will disproportionately harm low-income people who have no choice but to drive to work, often from homes far outside Seattle city limits. “The suburbanization of poverty is real,” says City Council member Rob Johnson, who supports creating a program to reduce costs for low-income drivers, similar to the existing ORCA LIFT low-income transit pass. “We’re pushing people out of the city and we’re not going to be able to build transit” fast enough to serve all the low-income workers who would be impacted by congestion pricing, Johnson says.

It’s unclear exactly how many low-income workers would actually be impacted by congestion pricing. In 2017, a Puget Sound Regional Council report concluded that low-income commuters “were much more likely to walk and take transit than the overall population”—a finding that corroborates a 2009 Washington State Department of Transportation report that found that “The poor are less likely than the non-poor to commute in a personal vehicle and more likely to commute using public transportation or other modes that would not be subject to tolls.” According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, just 37 percent of Seattle residents under the poverty line drove to work alone, compared to 48 percent of those making more than 150 percent of the poverty level.

“One of the things you hear whenever you talk about a congestion-pricing scheme is, ‘This will be unfair to low-income people,’ and there are a lot of anecdotes that get brought up that are certainly real,” O’Brien says. “But in a city like Seattle, where parking’s pretty expensive”—as much as $4.50 an hour for on-street parking downtown, and $10 an hour or more in private garages—“my sense is the majority of people who drive downtown are people who have a lot of options.” The way to address the needs of lower-income people who must drive downtown isn’t to reject congestion pricing altogether, O’Brien says, it’s to “design the system around their needs” so they won’t be burdened by extra costs; for example, by making it free to drive downtown at off-peak hours, when many shift workers start their jobs.

Hester Serebrin, policy director for the pro-transit Transportation Choices Coalition, says she sees no inherent contradiction between promoting alternatives to driving alone and creating an equitable, affordable transportation system. “[Congestion pricing] is a big, bold idea, so let’s go big with our policy asks,” she says. “If the goal is building a more equitable transportation system, that will inherently include a lot of things around transit speed and reliability and safe bike and pedestrian access.”

For now, the city remains in study mode, with more reports focusing on equity, race and social justice, and priorities for spending toll revenues due out later this year. Then it will have to sell the idea to the public, which could be a heavy lift, and not just because Seattle would be blazing a trail on congestion pricing for the rest of the country. People tend to hate the idea of paying for things that used to be free unless they can see concrete benefits. In Stockholm, leaders actually put tolls in place about seven months before seeking voter approval. Once voters saw how a $2.15 toll to drive downtown impacted the city—reducing traffic in the city center by 20 percent and cutting childhood asthma cases in half—they approved the plan by a majority of 53 percent. In London, where drivers pay about $15 to drive into the center city on weekdays, congestion went down by 30 percent, and public transit gained tens of thousands of new riders.

Could something similar happen in Seattle? O’Brien, the council member who started pushing for congestion pricing back in 2017, says he’s “feeling a lot more optimistic” now that Durkan “has shown that she is very interested in moving forward” with the concept. The trick, he says, will be demonstrating that people won’t get stuck in even worse traffic if they let go of their steering wheels. “Part of it is on [city leaders] to say, ‘We’re going to provide buses that have more space and aren’t stuck in traffic,’” O’Brien says. “If, in this new system, you can see that driving is more expensive and the bus will get you downtown faster, you’re going to see
the benefits.”

Editor’s note: The opening of this story, set in 2020, depicts a hypothetical situation. The Washington State Department of Transportation says that when the tunnel opens early in 2019, time-of-day tolls will vary from $1 on weekends to $2.25 during the afternoon peak. Currently, the Viaduct demolition is scheduled for completion mid-year 2019.

Transportation

Crashes Up, Biking Down in New Seattle Traffic Report

The annual traffic report from the Seattle Department of Transportation, which measures everything from how many cars are moving through the city to how many people are commuting by bike to how many pedestrians are injured and killed on Seattle’s streets, came out last week, and the news is not great for people who bike or walk in the city—that is, just about everyone.

Bike ridership is down (by 2.6%), the number of drivers injuring or killing cyclists and pedestrians is up, and the number of total collisions is up for the third year in a row—not an auspicious sign for the city’s “Vision Zero” plan, which aims to reduce the number of traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero by 2030. The citywide collision rate increased 6.3 percent over the last year; the rate of bike collisions stayed steady and the rate of collisions with pedestrians went up. Overall, 171 people were seriously injured and 20 were killed in collisions on Seattle streets last year, a 16.5 percent increase over 2015.

With “Vision Zero” in sight, serious injury and fatality crashes have barely budged for the past five years.

Some of the main “contributing circumstances” for collisions, in terms of sheer numbers, were: Inattention, “unknown driver distraction,” failure to grant right of way, following too closely, speeding, “improper turn,’ and driving under the influence of alcohol. Other circumstances that led to collisions: “Apparently asleep,” “driver grooming,” “driver reading or writing,” “had taken medication,” and driving on the wrong side of the road. Most of the pedestrians who were involved in collisions (57%) were in marked crosswalks when they were hit, and most were hit during daylight hours, not at night or dusk, when conventional wisdom says pedestrians are most likely to be hit (a trope that enables auto advocates and drive-time radio hosts to blame people in crosswalks for getting themselves run into). Bike collisions followed the same general trend, except that cyclists were less likely to get hit during winter months, when there are fewer of them on the roads. The color a cyclist was wearing when he or she was involved in a collision appears to be largely irrelevant—of 246 collisions for which clothing visibility was recorded, just 43 cyclists were wearing dark-colored clothing, including crashes that happened during the day and at night.

The offending chart

The report notes that the city’s Pedestrian Master Plan identified several locations for the city to monitor and report on every year, to see if people are speeding more or less at those locations. Unfortunately, this year’s report inexplicably fails to pull out information on those locations, as previous reports have done, so that people who pay attention to traffic trends can compare it to reports from previous years. To find out whether speeds have gone down on, say, Rainier Ave. S—historically one of the most dangerous corridors in the city, and a focus of a lot of Pedestrian Master Plan work since 2010—someone reading the report will have to scroll through pages of data in one of its appendices. This is not an insignificant issue, because a major point (if not the point) of tracking whether, and by how much, drivers are speeding is to see if things are getting better or worse. (You can dig through the appendices to find each segment individually, but who’s going to do that? Me, sure, but who else?) What the report does include is a chart that indicates the roads where the “85th percentile speed” (the speed at or below which 85 percent of drivers travel) is highest—a basically useless number in itself, because whether someone is speeding depends on the speed limit. Going  52 mph on a 50 mph highway is barely speeding, whereas going 45 in a 20 mph school zone amounts to reckless endangerment.

Dig into the report yourself, which includes lots of additional data about crashes, travel speeds, and traffic volumes, here.

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