Tag: Transportation Choices Coalition

Addiction, City Council, legislature, Morning Fizz, Transportation

State Could Eliminate Jaywalking Law; Right-Wing Group Attacks Seattle Council for Addiction Program They Had Nothing to Do With

1. If you’ve ever lived outside the Pacific Northwest, or spent time in virtually any big city elsewhere, you may wonder why the state of Washington still has, and enforces, laws against “jaywalking”—the practice of crossing the street midblock or while the light is green but the road is clear. (“Jay-walking” is an antique slur for a rube who doesn’t know enough to keep out of the road). Crossing the street in an area other than an intersection or against a signal can set you back $68, and you’re far more likely to be targeted if you’re Black; according to a 2017 analysis, more than a quarter of jaywalking tickets issued between 2010 and 2016 went to Black pedestrians, even though just 7 percent of Seattle residents are Black.

This year, legislators plan to propose a bill that would eliminate the specific law against jaywalking—or “crossing not at a crosswalk,” as the state’s 57-year-old jaywalking law describes it—which would make it legal to cross the street as long as it’s safe to do so. During a recent Transportation Choices Coalition-sponsored forum, state Sens. Javier Valdez (D-46) and Marko Liias (D-21), the head of the Senate Transportation Committee, noted that legislators laid the groundwork for getting rid of the jaywalking ban by specifying that pedestrians, like drivers, must exercise “due care” when using roads and sidewalks.

Now, Liias said,  “I don’t think we need a specific violation for jaywalking, because if law enforcement sees someone that’s violating that duty of care, just like if they see any other user [doing so], they already have tools to hold that person accountable. When you look at the history of how these laws were used, it’s clear that there’s been disproportionate enforcement against low-income and BIPOC communities.” Basically, Valdez added, the change would give people the ability to use common sense when crossing the street without risking an automatic penalty. In areas where stoplights are far apart, the rational choice is often to cross midblock rather than walking a quarter-mile or more each way just to get to the other side of the road.

TCC, along with Commute Seattle, the King County Department of Public Defense, and other groups have started a coalition called Free to Walk Washington to support the elimination of jaywalking laws, which would follow similar changes in California, Virginia, Nevada, and Kansas City, MO.

2. Change Washington, a “strategic communications organization” funded by the right-wing organization Project 42, often makes and promotes some pretty outrageous claims about the city of Seattle on its website, which includes cross-posts from Project 42-funded ventures like the podcast of a well-known former local FOX reporter. Last week, though, they got the attention of a Seattle City Council member with a post that not only mischaracterized a well-established addiction management technique called contingency management, but accused the whole city council of proposing a “giveaway to drug addicts”—a claim without even a passing connection to reality. (The post uses the sneering slur “addict” no fewer than seven times.)

Contingency management is a method of helping a person reduce their drug consumption by offering them small rewards, such as money, a gift card, or a small prize, for a negative drug test. In numerous studies, contingency management has been found to be one of the most effective methods for reducing or eliminating drug use, particularly among people whose main drug of choice is stimulants, for which there are no broadly effective medications. There is longstanding, research-backed scientific consensus that contingency management works. Even so, the city council has never proposed funding it.

“The budget that City Council passed last month does not include funding for a contingency management program,” Herbold wrote Change Washington in an email. “I am unaware of any City Councilmember that has a proposal for a contingency management program,” she added, since the city doesn’t fund public health care programs—the county does. King County’s DCHS Behavioral Health and Recovery Division got approval last year to fund a contingency management pilot project.

After mischaracterizing contingency management as a frivolous “giveaway to addicts” that will just give them money to buy drugs and mocking its proponents for supposedly thinking “gift cards cure mental illness,” the conservative group also trashed needle exchanges, which prevent the spread of diseases like HIV and hepatitis, and said a better solution would be to force addicted people into (presumably locked) mental health facilities where they could be “monitored” to make sure they changed their ways. The post ends with a warning to council members about next year’s elections. But it looks like the election disinformation has already started.

criminal justice, King County, legislature, Transit, Transportation

Legislation Eliminates One Objection to Sound Transit Fare Enforcement Reform
Image by SeattleDude via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

Legislation that would make it easier for Sound Transit to adopt a fare enforcement system that does not involve the court or criminal justice system is coasting through the state senate after passing the house on a near-unanimous bipartisan vote.

House Bill 1301, originally sponsored by Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34, Seattle), gives Sound Transit the authority to create an “alternative fare enforcement system” that could include resolutions other than fines for people who fail to pay their fare. The state senate transportation committee voted unanimously on Tuesday to move the bill to the rules committee, the final step before a floor vote.

Sound Transit director Peter Rogoff and some Sound Transit board members have resisted reforming the agency’s fare enforcement procedures, arguing that removing penalties—which include steep fines that, if unpaid, can lead to criminal charges—would lead to revenue shortfalls as people simply stop paying fares. And although the agency has instituted some reforms in the wake of the pandemic, negative press, and data showing that fare enforcement disproportionately impacts Black riders, the changes it has made so far fall far short of King County Metro’s proactive approach, which focuses more on harm reduction and access than punishment and fines.

“There’s a law-and-order mentality that’s more pervasive in Sound Transit than at Metro, both among agency staff and the board.”—Transit Riders Union general secretary Katie Wilson

Advocates, who have pointed to King County Metro’s far-reaching fare reforms as a local best practice, have long been skeptical of the claim that Sound Transit is powerless to keep fare enforcement out of the court system, but say they’re happy to see the issue resolved beyond any doubt.

“They [Sound Transit] kept insisting that they couldn’t do what Metro was doing [to decriminalize fare nonpayment], and one of the excuses they started giving us was they were bound by Sound Transit’s authorizing legislation to use the court system for citations,” said Katie Wilson, general secretary of the Transit Riders Union. “So that’s what this legislation takes care of.” Continue reading “Legislation Eliminates One Objection to Sound Transit Fare Enforcement Reform” →

Economy, Equity, Guest Contributor, Transit, Transportation

Alex Hudson: The Path to a Just Transportation Recovery

By Alex Hudson

When the pandemic began and much of the world stopped moving, public transit carried on, connecting essential workers to jobs and people to food, health care, and other critical services. Bus drivers bravely continued working to get people where they needed to go, and adapted to help deliver food to seniors and patients to care. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a deep truth: public transit is, and always will be, essential.

There is worry that ridership is down now and won’t return. These fears are based on a return to pre-COVID levels of congestion and skyrocketing used car sales. But the risks of veering away from transit in a post-pandemic world are huge. If drivers get back in their cars exclusively, we’ll cut people off from opportunity and will be stuck in worse congestion than before, resulting in wasted time, more greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants that make our planet less livable, and hundreds of lives lost to preventable crashes.

The vision for public transit in a post-pandemic Puget Sound hasn’t changed: It must be fast, frequent, reliable and affordable. COVID-19 has simply underscored the urgency of addressing how we plan for and fund it. As we recover, the smart and most affordable investment we can make is in building a resilient and accessible public transit system that connects people to opportunities, creates good paying jobs, and supports our climate goals.

Here are three steps we can take to get there:

Invest in transit like it’s a key part of a just economic recovery—because it is. There can be no economic recovery without well-funded public transit. In Seattle, essential workers account for 33 percent of transit riders. These folks keep Seattle’s hospitals running, our grocery stores stocked, and provide social service, caretaking and education that all of us are depending on. In addition to getting people to their jobs, transit investments create good, green, family-wage jobs that last. An analysis of the 2009 stimulus package found that stimulus dollars spent on transit projects created more jobs than dollars spent building or maintaining highways. “To create the most jobs per dollar, invest in transit and maintenance,” the analysis concluded.

Transportation is a household’s second-highest cost, and the average household in King County spends more than $12,500 per year on their vehicles. In 2019, seven million Americans were at least three months behind on their car loans. As unemployment remains high and household finances are stretched to the breaking point, public transit is a desperately-needed affordable alternative to driving that millions of people across the country are counting on.

To keep our communities strong during this challenging economic climate, public transit must be centered in recovery plans and cannot be left out of the federal stimulus packages. All new COVID relief funding on the local, state, and federal levels must include investments for transit, teleliving, biking, walking, and rolling. To make sure this happens, we have to continue building strong coalitions across business, labor, environmental, and social justice advocates. We need everyone at the table.

Pay for it now, or pay the price later. Transit is a fundamental pillar of a functional economy, yet we have seen that the funding that keeps transit moving is fragile and overlooked at every level of government. TransitCenter estimates that across the country, transit agencies will see a $26 billion-$40 billion annual shortfall due to COVID. Declines in fare revenue, as well as the underlying supporting taxes, leave our agencies facing extreme budget shortfalls and elected leaders grappling with no easy choices.

Funding for transit in Washington has never been resilient or adequate. The 18th Amendment to our state Constitution restricts how we can spend transportation dollars. Rather than using gas tax money to create a more efficient and sustainable system overall, the state is forced to funnel money into highway projects, many of which only further pollution and congestion. This outdated restriction must be reconsidered—our social, economic and environmental future depends on it.

Washington lacks progressive revenue options for transit, and the passage of I-976 left local governments with even fewer tools. We need to move away from regressive, restrictive, and volatile sources of funding like the gas tax and replace them with sustainable and resilient funding options, like an equitably designed road user charge or congestion pricing and a statewide air quality surcharge. While working toward reform, we must continue to utilize the existing tools and support local transit ballot measures, starting by passing Seattle Proposition 1 and renewing the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, which funds transit investments in Seattle, for another six years.

Prioritize racial equity in our recovery plan and undue long standing disparities. The pandemic has exacerbated inequities that exist within and are caused by our transportation system. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) experience disproportionate impacts through exposure to air and noise pollution caused by racist planning decisions which built traffic arterials and highways in their communities, lowering home values, separating communities, and increasing exposure to air and noise pollution and preventable traffic violence. Health disparities caused by exposure to air pollution, such as higher rates of asthma, have left BIPOC communities more vulnerable to contracting COVID. Creating an equitable transportation system is literally a matter of life or death for BIPOC communities in Washington. Continue reading “Alex Hudson: The Path to a Just Transportation Recovery” →

Affordability, Bikes, City Council, City Hall, homelessness, housing, land use, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Transportation, zoning

Morning Crank: Bike Board Chair Abruptly Dismissed; Safe Seattle Sues; and More
Photo from 2015 Seattle Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan

1. Last month, about an hour before the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board’s was scheduled to hold its monthly meeting, board chair Casey Gifford got a call from Evan Philip, the boards and commissions administrator for Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office. Philip told Gifford that he was calling  to let her know that the meeting she was about to chair would be her final meeting—the mayor had decided not to reappoint her for a second term.  Then, Gifford recalls, he asked her if she had any questions.

Gifford, who works as a  planner with King County Metro and serves on the Cascade Bicycle Club board, was in shock. “I said that I was surprised to be receiving that information so close to the meeting and that I would need some time to process it,” she says. A few days later, she recounts, “I called him and left several voice mails” requesting a meeting or a phone call to discuss some questions she had about Durkan’s decision. Philip responded on November 16 with a terse email, explaining that “other Seattle residents had expressed interest in serving on this Commission and in the spirit of expanding civic engagement, we offered the position to another applicant.” In a subsequent email, he elaborated—sort of. “As mentioned earlier, the Mayor is committed to bringing in new voices and appoint those that have a lived experience to our Boards. As you may be aware, reappointment to a Board or Commission is not guaranteed.”

Like every mayor, Durkan is remaking the city’s bureaucracy, including the volunteer boards and commissions, in her own image.  But several advocates told me they’re worried that Durkan is pushing bike advocates affiliated with activist groups like Cascade and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways aside as part of a transportation agenda that prioritizes transit (and driving) over cycling. The mayor’s office denies this, and points out that Durkan appointed Cascade’s executive director, Richard Smith, to serve on the committee advising the mayor’s office on the Seattle Department of Transportation director selection.

Durkan’s new appointee, Selina Urena, is a former fundraiser for BikeWorks who now works for the Transportation Choices Coalition, a group whose former executive director, Shefali Ranganathan, is now deputy mayor. Urena was nominated by Durkan directly, without going through the usual application process, which includes one-on-one interviews with members of a bike board committee established explicitly for that purpose.  In an email responding to my questions about the mayor’s decision not to appoint Gifford, Durkan spokesman Mark Prentice said, of Urena (who uses they/them pronouns), “they are a multimodal transportation user and enjoys exploring the City by bike” and referred me to Urena’s TCC bio.

 “I  don’t think that the board is being set up for success. … There a lot of institutional knowledge that has been lost.” – Casey Gifford, former Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board chair

Gifford says Philip never explained why Durkan did not reappoint her to the board, nor what he meant by “lived experience.” (Gifford is a young woman of color who uses a bike as her primary form of transportation.) She adds that in her experience, it’s unusual for the mayor’s office to take such a direct role in the appointment process, which usually involves an application and interview process with members of the board itself. “I know that the mayor’s office was more involved in the process than they ever have been in the past, and that they they knew who they wanted and pushed those people forward even without the recommendation of the board members who were reviewing apps with a set criteria and a set process,” Gifford said. “It didn’t sound like the mayor’s office was using those criteria, and it wasn’t really clear what criteria they were using.”

Gifford’s departure means that the bike board will be made up almost entirely of newcomers at a time when the fate of the city’s planned bicycle infrastructure is very much up in the air. Just one member, city council appointee Amanda Barnett, is continuing into a second term.  “I  don’t think that the board is being set up for success,” Gifford says. “There are now seven of 12 [board members] that are brand new, and it takes a while to get up to speed on how the board works and how to be effective. … There a lot of institutional knowledge that has been lost.”

Gifford may have another opportunity to serve on the board yet. City Council member Mike O’Brien, who says he considered the way Gifford was informed her term was ending “kind of unprofessional and not worthy of someone [Gifford] who’s doing really good work,” says he’ll nominate her himself if she wants to continue to serve. “It’s important to have new perspectives and new energy, but it’s also important to have some people who have been around,” O’Brien says. Gifford says she has talked to O’Brien about the possibility and that “it is something that I am considering.”

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2 .Safe Seattle, an online group that recently filed paperwork to become a 501(c)4 political nonprofit (via), is suing the city and the Low-Income Housing Institute to force the closure of a LIHI-operated “tiny house village” in South Lake Union, using many of the same arguments that a statewide anti-labor group, the Freedom Foundation, made when it filed a land use petition to to prevent the facility from opening back in June. (That case is still ongoing, although the Freedom Foundation itself is no longer a named plaintiff). The Freedom Foundation’s attorney, Richard Stephens, is representing Safe Seattle in the new lawsuit, which—like the earlier complaint—charges that LIHI does not have the correct permits to operate its encampment. Unlike the earlier, dismissed complaint, which claimed that LIHI’s encampment violated the city’s self-imposed limit of three transitional encampments at at time, this complaint claims that LIHI lacks both residential permits (on the grounds that the tiny houses are residences) and  a required encampment operations plan. The complaint also claims that the encampment constitutes an “assisted living facility” (on the grounds that LIHI provides housing and services to vulnerable people) for which it lacks a permit.

The amount of scrutiny that has landed on this one encampment—as well as the Freedom Foundation’s motivation for focusing on a single encampment in South Lake Union—is hard to explain. In addition to the lawsuits by the Freedom Foundation, Safe Seattle, and the individual plaintiffs (all represented by Stephens), a group called Unified Seattle has spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads opposing tiny-house encampments, with an emphasis on the South Lake Union encampment.

3. A recent email from Queen Anne neighborhood activist Marty Kaplan, who has spent years locked in a legal battle to keep backyard and basement apartments out of single-family areas, included a telling line. After lavishing praise on the Seattle Times and its anti-density columnist Danny Westneat for joining him in the fight against missing-middle housing, Kaplan concluded: “Our ultimate goal: to negotiate a fair compromise that better meets the needs of all of Seattle’s homeowners.” Left out of Kaplan’s (and the Times’) equation? The majority of Seattle’s population, who rent their homes and are probably less concerned with “meeting the needs of all of Seattle’s homeowners” than they are with being able to stay in a city where laws designed to boost homeowners’ property values are making the city unaffordable for everyone else.

Election 2017, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: Potential for Conflicts

1. The Seattle Times ran a story this weekend about the Move Seattle Levy shortfall, including the latest on “recalibrated expectations” for what the $930 million, voter-approved plan will cover. (I broke the news about the Move Seattle Levy “reset” at the beginning of April.) The story, by David Gutman, includes the news that the firm Cocker Fennessy will be paid about $34,000 to do an assessment of SDOT, on top of about $30,000 to “coordinate the city’s next steps” on the streetcar project. Anne Fennessy, one of two partners in the firm, has known Durkan for decades.

There are a few details about Fennessy that Gutman didn’t mention. First: Fennessy is married to David Moseley, one of Durkan’s three deputy mayors . The contracts thus constitute a potential conflict of interest: Not only is Fennessy an old friend and colleague of Durkan’s, she is married to Durkan’s second-in-command. (Both Cocker Fennessy and Moseley maxed out to Durkan’s campaign last year, giving $500 each.)

There are ways to address this kind of potential conflict. Previously, when Moseley was director of Washington State Ferries, Cocker Fennessy simply agreed not to represent the ferry system. However, as deputy mayor, Moseley’s duties are broader than they were at WSF, making potential conflicts of interest harder to track. Moseley has taken the lead for the mayor’s office on a few specific issues—homelessness and issues related to utilities, such as the appointment of a new City Light director—but has met with city council members about other issues, including transportation. (And, of course, utilities make up a huge part of the streetcar construction project, which is already underway on First Avenue).

Stephanie Formas, Durkan’s spokeswoman, says Moseley “has not participated in any aspect of the streetcar review nor the broader review of SDOT. Deputy Mayor Moseley and Anne Fennessy have also previously consulted with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.”

Second: Fennessy is a board member at the Transportation Choices Coalition, whose former director, Shefali Ranganathan, is another one of Durkan’s deputy mayors. Transportation for Washington, TCC’s political arm, maxed out to Durkan last year and endorsed her over her opponent Cary Moon. (TCC signed a letter supporting the streetcar earlier this year.) Ranganathan is the key point of contact for the streetcar project, according to Formas.

And third: Fennessy and Moseley live directly on the streetcar route, where the street has already been ripped up for construction.

None of these connections, on its own, necessarily constitutes an insurmountable ethical issue. But the fact that the mayor has given two high-profile contracts to an old friend and colleague who also has deep ties to two of her deputy mayors—an old friend who happens to live right next one of the projects she is being paid to help review, a project of which Durkan herself has been critical—certainly reads like a throwback to the cozy, insular governance of old Seattle. Tim Ceis, anyone?

2. The Ballard branch of the Seattle Public Library—which, as I reported last week, excludes a larger number of people for sleeping or lying down on library property than most other branches—has installed a series of bent metal pipes to deter people from sitting on flat surfaces outside the library. The pipes, according to library spokeswoman Andra Addison, cost about $10,000 for “fabrication and installation” and were installed after “patrons and neighbors …  expressed concern about security and hygiene issues, citing unattended items left overnight in those areas, smoking, food and beverage waste, feces, urine and discarded needles, which fall through the grates into the parking garage below.

“The purpose of the metal work is to limit access to those areas to ensure an outdoor environment that is safe, clean and welcoming to patrons and passersby,” Addison said.

Hostile architecture is a type of urban design in which public spaces are constructed or altered to make them uncomfortable or unpleasant places for people to sit, lie down, or linger. It includes things like armrests in the middle of benches, spikes on windowsills, bike racks where homeless people used to camp, and “metalwork” that prevents anyone, homeless and housed alike, from perching on flat surfaces outside public buildings.

3. The search to find a permanent replacement for former Seattle Department of Transportation director Scott Kubly, who resigned last December, continues to creak forward, with the appointment earlier this month of a panel of experts to help Mayor Jenny Durkan select a new SDOT leader. The committee reportedly includes: Former Washington State Department of Transportation director Paula Hammond, Transportation Choices Coalition policy director Hester Serebrin, Seattle Metro Chamber director Marilyn Strickland, King County Metro general manager Rob Gannon, and Port of Seattle regional transportation manager Geri Poor.

Durkan has not announced a new interim director to replace Sparrman, who will leave at the end of August to take a job at HNTB Corporation, a consulting firm that has a large engineering contract with Sound Transit as well as numerous open contracts with the city of Seattle. Meanwhile, Andrew Glass Hastings—who, as SDOT’s transit and mobility director, has been an advocate for multimodal transportation, including pedestrian and bike infrastructure as well as the controversial downtown streetcar—is out. His deputy, Christina Van Valkenburgh, will reportedly replace him.

 

City Hall, Crime, criminal justice, Election 2017, immigration, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: “If you haven’t learned, I’m sorry. That’s your fault.”

1.  Have we had enough transparency yet? The 15 candidates to fill the city council seat being vacated by interim mayor Tim Burgess have now had two chances to make the case for themselves, and what we’ve learned is that Alex Tsimerman thinks Lorena Gonzalez is a “cheap potato,” Tiniell Cato thinks it’s her “human right” to talk out of order and go over her allotted time, and Lewis Jones—the guy who made hand-painted signs for his “campaign” for mayor—believes special enzymes in purple grape juice cure the flu.

The job qualifications for the temporary council position include knowledge of the city budget and familiarity with city government. A group of advocates that included third-place mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver and Gender Justice League director Danni Askini argued that the process for filling the seat needed to be more “transparent” so that a wider range of people would apply. That range extends, apparently, from people who use the term  “colored people” (Jones again) all the way to people named Doug who have the endorsement of “Doug’s Voter’s Guide,” written by Doug.

The clear frontrunner remains former council member Nick Licata, who has participated gamely in both forums, and praised the council for opening up the process to the general public. Tsimerman, for his part, described the process as a “circus for children” that would end up with the same result as if the council had just picked a candidate. Then he was removed from council chambers by security.

2. Mayoral candidate Cary Moon, who appeared alone onstage at a mayoral forum Tuesday night (her opponent, Jenny Durkan, was hosting a campaign fundraiser at the downtown offices of the K&L Gates law firm), has maintained that she will be able to serve on the Sound Transit board despite the fact that her husband, architect Mark Reddington, is a principal at LMN Architects, a firm that is doing design work on numerous Sound Transit light rail stations. (The Seattle Times was the first to report that Moon might be unable to serve on the board.) At a forum on the arts and environment earlier this week, Moon said the potential conflict “doesn’t mean I won’t get to serve on the Sound Transit board” and said that if that “very minor situation… arises, I will recuse myself and someone else from the city will be empowered to make that decision on my behalf.”

After Tuesday night’s forum, Moon told me she believed that if the board was taking a vote that could impact LMN, such as a vote on one of the firm’s contracts, she could delegate her vote to “somebody else, like the SDOT director or deputy mayor or someone on the council.” It’s unclear whether Sound Transit board members are able to delegate their votes in this fashion, however, and Sound Transit’s ethics policy includes no obvious provision for board members to tag in another Seattle representative in this way. It says,

If a conflict of interest is confirmed, the Board member shall disqualify himself or herself from discussion or voting upon the legislation or matter, and an officer shall refrain from discussion or recommendation concerning the legislation or matter, if discussion or voting thereon would constitute a conflict of interest, or apparent conflict of interest, as described in this section or violate any other governmental law or regulation. Any Board member or officer who is disqualified by reason of such conflict of interest shall, after having made the required disclosure set forth above, remove himself or herself from his or her customary seat during such debate and leave the Board Resolution No. 81-2 Page 14 of 20 chambers until such time as the matter at hand, from which such Board member or officer has been disqualified, has been disposed of in the regular course of business. Any action taken by the Board or a committee related to such interest shall be by a vote sufficient for the purpose without counting the vote of the Board member having the interest.

Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick said he couldn’t “speculate about issues or circumstances around any particular candidate or other individual in the event she or he were to be appointed to the Board,” and noted that it’s up to the county executive to decide which Seattle representative or representatives to appoint to the Sound Transit board.

3. Also at Tuesday’s forum, things got heated between city attorney Pete Holmes and his opponent, former mayoral public-safety advisor Scott Lindsay, when Lindsay blasted Holmes for aggressively prosecuting men who pay for sex even when those men may be subject to deportation. (In recent years, the city has moved away from prosecuting prostitutes to cracking down on johns, in an effort to avoid revictimizing women who have been trafficked and sold against their will.) Lindsay said he would adopt an approach that did not result in men being deported for attempting to solicit prostitutes.

Then Holmes took the mic: “We have to hold sex buyers accountable for driving the commercial sex industry that, in turn, is driving most of human trafficking,” Holmes said. “We have a fundamental disagreement [with immigration lawyers.] It only takes a second violation for sex buying before you can be subject to deportation under federal law. The first one will not get you deported. And I’m sorry, I lose sympathy on the second one. If you haven’t learned, I’m sorry. That’s your fault.”

4. Seattle Subway, a transit advocacy group, has been in a bit of a war with the political arm of the Transportation Choices Coalition, the influential pro-transit nonprofit, over its endorsement of Jenny Durkan for mayor. (TCC spearheaded the Sound Transit 3 and Move Seattle campaigns; its endorsing arm is called Transportation for Washington). On its Twitter feed, Subway said that TCC’s endorsement was “clearly” not based on Durkan’s platform (nor, presumably, her political views, track record, or ability to deliver on her promises), but on some mysterious “something else.”

Yesterday, the group doubled down with this subtweet, claiming that “racist shock jock Jason Rantz” (of right-wing radio station KTTH) had endorsed Durkan:

The implication is that Durkan has views that are somehow in line with Rantz’s, and is perhaps even “racist” by association—and what kind of transit group would support a candidate like that? However, I found no evidence anywhere that Jason Rantz has endorsed or expressed support for Durkan—which makes sense, given that Durkan is a liberal Obama appointee and a mainstay in the local Democratic Party establishment. Rantz doesn’t write about Seattle electoral politics much (his audience is more “hypertensive suburban MAGA dad” than “Seattle odd-year voter”) but I did find one piece where he mentioned Durkan—as the candidate to vote for if your issue is “identity politics.”

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King County, Transit, Transportation

Should Amazon Cover Costs of Intern Bus Crowding?

This story originally ran in Seattle Magazine.

Last month the Seattle Times reported that hundreds of new Amazon interns, each wearing identical company-issued black backpacks, are crowding out other commuters on King County Metro’s Route 70. The overcrowded buses, which forced drivers to skip some stops when full, led Metro to take the unusual step of adding service to the route for the rest of the summer without the extensive public process that typically informs long-term service increases.

Metro service development manager Bill Bryant says the bus agency routinely provides extra service for special events, like Pride or the Women’s March, and temporary disruption such as the periodic closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. “We really do not want to see any situation where specific trips on a route are passing customers by on a regular basis,” he says. “We received multiple reports that people were getting passed by [on Route 70], and we decided to pull the trigger.”

According to Metro spokesman Scott Gutierrez, about 400 more people than usual were riding Route 70 when Metro decided to add service. The current uptick in service during morning rush hour—two extra buses between 6:30 and 10:30 a.m.—is costing Metro about $3,600 a week.

Shefali Ranganathan, director of the transit advocacy group Transportation Choices Coalition, says the “bottom-line question is, should Metro explore a broader partnership with Amazon where Amazon buys service hours from Metro” to mitigate their impact on the system. “Maybe this is something [Metro] should approach not just as a one-off [service improvement] but as a broader partnership that would benefit Amazon and the broader community, which is what Microsoft does,” Ranganathan says.

There’s precedent for this: Back in 2012, Amazon paid for the South Lake Union streetcar to run more frequently, although that money was compensation for land the city gave Amazon to expand its South Lake Union campus.

Microsoft, somewhat controversially, has given its workers a way to opt out of the public transit system entirely by creating a private option, the Microsoft Connector, which has grown into the largest private regional bus system in the nation. Since last year, Amazon has offered its own limited shuttle service, called Amazon Ride, which runs four shuttle buses between the company’s two main campuses in South Lake Union and the University District. The company also spends $12 million on ORCA transit passes for its employees.

Of course, Amazon’s expansion in the city isn’t limited to a few hundred summer interns. Earlier this year, the company announced that it was hiring 100,000 new U.S. employees by mid-2018, and advertised more than 9,000 new job openings in Seattle. Most of those new jobs will be in South Lake Union, meaning that the pressure on Metro service will only grow. “The growth in South Lake Union, just across the board, continues,” Bryant says. “The choice to add service to keep customers moving and to prevent pass-bys is not a hard choice for us.”

As a transit agency charged with getting cars off the roads, Metro wants to make sure all those new customers keep coming back to use its service, rather than giving up and driving to work alone. But Metro has also made a commitment, through its service guidelines, to serve low-income and minority communities, such as Southeast Seattle. When Metro decides where to add service during its twice-annual service adjustment process, it looks not just at demand but at how well the system is serving the goal of racial equity.

A few tens of thousands of dollars shifted over to South Lake Union over the summer may not sound like much. But if Amazon’s growth creates the demand for permanent shifts in service, that could put Metro in the position of choosing between racial equity and full buses passing people by.

Amazon, which provided information on its existing shuttle service through a spokesman, did not respond to a request for information about any plans to expand its shuttle service. Although the company confirmed that it is actively working with Metro to plan for increased ridership from the UW to South Lake Union, Bryant says “we haven’t had any significant conversations with Amazon about significantly increasing their shuttle service.”

Peter Rogoff
Density, Development, land use, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: The Right Side of History

Peter Rogoff

In the spirit of last Friday’s Morning Crank, here are five things I heard at the Transportation Choices Coalition’s New Year’s transportation forum, held last Wednesday at City Hall. I moderated the panel, which included city council member Rob Johnson, TCC advocacy director Abigail Doerr, King County Council member Claudia Balducci, and Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff. In truth, the statements I’m quoting are from Rogoff and Johnson, whose comments dealt specifically with the political situation in Seattle; this is not an attempt to silence Doerr or Balducci, the two other women on the panel, whose thoughts on Metro, transit on the Eastside, and the future of transportation advocacy were cogent and valuable. For my Seattle politics site, though, I’ve focused on the remarks specific to Seattle politics, and encourage you to watch the whole event yourself on the Seattle Channel website; the whole thing runs about an hour.

1. Johnson, on what it will take to ensure that Metro’s expansion of Rapid Ride bus service throughout the city will be true bus rapid transit, not just express buses stuck in traffic: “We need to connect with individuals on the ground about the rationale for why [we’re building Rapid Ride]. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with somebody who articulates their strong environmental values and in the same breath talks to me about how important it is for people to have more parking spaces in the city. We need to do a much better job connecting the values of our city around sustainability, the environment, and race and social justice with the importance of capital facilities like bus-only lanes.

“The 44 is a critical bus route that runs, basically, from the very tail end of Ballard all the way through Fremont, Wallingford, and the University of Washington, and I believe we should be expanding that as a Rapid Ride corridor and running it all the way to University Village. When we do, we’re going to receive opposition not just from the community but from business owners who will say, ‘Taking away a parking space hurts my business. My argument would be that everyone who gets on and off a bus has a wallet too, and they could be spending money in your business.”

“It’s really disturbing for me when I hear somebody talking about how glad they were to see the neighborhood district councils stand up for single-family zoning and then in the next breath disparage the president for wanting to build a wall between the US and Mexico. I see those two things as actually linked.” – City Council member Rob Johnson

2. Rogoff, on the long history of collisions, many of them fatal,  between light rail trains and pedestrians in the Rainier Valley—a lower-income area, populated largely by people of color, that is the only part of the regional system where light rail runs primarily at street level: “This is not just a light or rail grade crossing safety risk. It is also, quite frankly, more prominently a pedestrian safety risk. There’s a tendency for people to be walking on the streets looking at their devices with earbuds in their ears and it’s killed a whole bunch of people. It already did. There’s only so much we can do, frankly, for someone who insists on walking singularly focused on their device, with music playing in their ears, when our warnings, our available warnings, in addition to putting down gates to actually block [the crossing] is lights and alarms.” (Rail crossings in the Rainier Valley, it’s worth noting, do not include physical barriers between pedestrian areas and the tracks.)

3. Johnson, on the possibility that the city and county will lose federal funds in retaliation for remaining “sanctuary” jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration crackdowns: “We will fight back against those cuts. There is a strong argument that we can make that says you can’t cut our transportation dollars because of a decision that we make on immigration, but we also are prepared to lose every single penny of those federal funds to make sure that we are a welcoming city.

“The biggest concern for me is watching the appropriation process on an annual basis, making sure that the federal funds that have been allocated to us as a region actually get appropriated to us.”

4. Rogoff, on the possibility that the Trump Administration could cut federal funding, to Sound Transit (Trump is reportedly taking its cues on transportation from the Heritage Foundation, which advocates eliminating federal funding for public transit, and his transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, is a GOP insider who is closely affiliated with the foundation):  “[Trump] said a lot of things, actually throughout the campaign. … There’s a lot of upticks that come with [transportation budget] proposals in some administrations and downticks that come with proposals [in] other administrations, but often Congress levels out the upticks and downticks quite a bit. Congress is going to have to consent to the budget presented by the White House. … I would just say, watch this space and see if their proposals will be as draconian as expected.”

Rob Johnson

5. Finally, Johnson, bringing down the transit-loving, density-friendly house on the contentious University District upzone, which Johnson’s Planning, Land Use and Zoning Committee will discuss tomorrow morning:  “This is about making sure that the council members that represent those districts where we’re going to see long-term investments are also going to be willing to stand up to single-family homeowners who are saying,  ‘Don’t turn my single-family home into a place where you can build a duplex or a triplex.’

“I feel, as the chair of the committee, that it’s my responsibility to make sure that we’re a welcoming city for everybody, and it’s really disturbing for me when I hear … somebody talking about how glad they were to see the neighborhood district councils stand up for single-family zoning and then in the next breath disparage the president for wanting to build a wall between the US and Mexico. I see those two things as actually linked. I see us, as a city, really needing to build more housing for more people, because we’re adding 40 people per day but we’re only building 12 housing units per day, and that’s creating an economic circumstance where lower-income people and middle-income people are being forced out of the city, and I think we need the political will for folks to step in that space and create change for more density around those stations. I firmly believe that. It may result in me only having this job for four years, but if that’s the case, I feel like I’ll have gone down on the right side of history.”