Advocates Urge City to Adopt More Ambitious, Less Car-Centric Transportation Levy
Mayor Bruce Harrell's 22-page proposal would cut funding for sidewalks and transit upgrades while going all-in on auto-oriented paving projects.
By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, the city released a 22-page transportation levy renewal proposal that would bring in $1.3 billion to fund roads, bridges, and sidewalks over the next eight years, with $218 million for bridge maintenance, $109 million for sidewalks and pedestrian improvements, and $107 million on Vision Zero and school safety projects.
Adjusted for inflation and timeline (the new levy is eight years instead of nine), that's about $33 more million a year than the Move Seattle levy that's about to expire—hardly enough to maintain the status quo, much less invest in new initiatives, especially once construction cost inflation is factored in.
After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the levy last week, advocates for safer streets began pointing out inconsistencies between the city's rhetoric about the proposal—which Harrell said "will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected" no matter how people get around—and what the levy would actually fund.
Although the graphics-heavy proposal is noticeably light on specifics, the balance of spending categories skews heavily toward car-oriented projects, including road repairs, new pavement "on our busiest streets," and bridge maintenance, including upgrades and planning for the replacement of the Ballard and Magnolia Bridges.
Compared to the Move Seattle Levy, the new levy plan cuts spending on transit connections by 30 percent; cuts pedestrian projects, including new sidewalks, by 23 percent; and cuts spending on freight mobility by 45 percent, according to an analysis by Whose Streets? Our Streets! organizer Ethan Campbell. Spending on "climate and resiliency" projects is up 111 percent from the previous levy, but that category—as described in the levy proposal—focuses mostly on planting trees, expanding access to EV chargers, and increasing "low-emissions goods delivery in areas most impacted by climate change and pollution," rather than shifting people away from cars. Vehicles account for almost two-thirds of all greenhouse-gas emissions in Seattle.
Advocates for safer streets say the levy also represents a capitulation on the city's Vision Zero goal of reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030, which is within the timeline of the eight-year levy. In Seattle, as in many cities, traffic deaths—particularly pedestrian deaths—have been trending upward over the past several years, as the Seattle Department of Transportation acknowledged in its "Vision Zero Top-To-Bottom Review" last year.
"Seattle adopted Vision Zero ... in 2015, and yet over 1,500 people have been seriously injured and over 200 have been killed since then," Erica Bush, director of Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, said on Monday, at a press conference held by a coalition of advocates outside City Hall. "We will not see this trend change until we commit to completely reimagining the way we use our roadways."
At the Monday press conference, safety advocates pushed for a levy of at least $1.7 billion, with at least half of the funding dedicated to street safety and mobility for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, noted that broken and missing sidewalks often force people who use wheelchairs, scooters, and walkers to "navigate the streets alongside cars," putting their lives at risk.
The levy proposes adding just 250 blocks of sidewalks and sidewalk alternatives, like curbless paved "walkways," over eight years—about 2 percent of the 11,000 blocks that currently lack sidewalks. At that rate, advocates said, it will take the city at least 400 years to complete its sidewalk network. "In the same proposal that cuts pedestrian infrastructure, it also set an ambitious goal of filling every pothole in 72 hours," Black said. "[The] transportation system that the mayor is proposing [is] one where we measure our response times to infrastructure for cars in hours, and our response to infrastructure for pedestrians in centuries."
During a meeting of the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee Tuesday night, members raised questions about how the levy will advance the city's Vision Zero goals. "Why don't we have an outcome [in the levy proposal] that says 'reduce deaths and serious injuries to zero by 2030'?" committee member Inga Manskopf asked. "And quite frankly, if that's not an outcome of this levy, then why are we still calling it Vision Zero?"
SDOT downtown mobility deputy director Meghan Shepard responded that the goals of Vision Zero are embedded in every aspect of the plan, from traffic signal timing upgrades to leading pedestrian signals to street repaving.
"Not having a goal [in the plan] doesn't mean it's not still a goal," Shepard said. "This [plan] is really to articulate how this funding will support a pivot in the way that we're implementing [Vision Zero]." Noting that the city has "pivoted" to the USDOT's "safe system" approach, which involves creating multiple layers of protection to prevent deaths and serious injuries, Shepard said the city recognized "that the trend was heading in the wrong direction."
Without the level of detail included in earlier levies, though, it's hard to tell exactly what kind of pivot the levy "articulates." For example, the plan says the levy will fund "safety projects on 12 or more corridors in the High Injury Network" to advance the city's Vision Zero goals, but doesn't say what kind of "safety projects" those will be, which "corridors," or what it means to fund a project along a corridor, which could mean anything from a new crosswalk signal to miles of substantive improvements. (Confusingly, the one page the proposal dedicates to "Vision Zero and School Safety" includes nine "corridors" as "candidate projects" for all Vision Zero and school safety projects).
The Move Seattle levy proposal, in contrast, included a detailed project list, along with maps showing where these projects would be located throughout the city. This year's plan, in contrast, includes just two maps of "candidate projects" and no project list. In an interview with PubliCola, SDOT deputy director Francisca Stefan said the city learned during the last levy cycle that unanticipated events—like COVID and the closure of the West Seattle Bridge—can lead to disappointment if the city promises specific projects and can't deliver. "Candidate projects," she said, is a way of saying "we intend to do those projects. ... That's the starting package, and changes may occur."
Stefan said she's "really optimistic" that the levy will result in progress toward Vision Zero. In addition to the "pivot" to safe systems, Stefan noted that the city recently elevated its chief traffic engineer, Venu Nemani, to the position of chief safety officer, "so he has both authority and accountability for safety." Stefan added that the city has already started making lower-cost but high-impact changes—prohibiting right turns on red at high-traffic intersections, for example, and "hardening" center lanes to stop drivers from making illegal left turns or plowing into pedestrians in crosswalks.
"What I'm really excited about is the way in which, now that the team and those funds are positioned within the traffic engineering function, we can effectively and quickly scale up these" changes, Stefan said. "They're tested, we know they work. And while we were doing them before, the Vision Zero team had to do a lift every time they wanted to do one of these things."
Polling by the mayor's office revealed that voters would have approved a $1.7 billion levy—the highest level tested—but Harrell opted to go for a status-quo renewal, prompting many advocates to question why (and push for Harrell, and SDOT, to be more ambitious). Responding to those questions on Tuesday, SDOT's Shepard said that "while we saw support for both package sizes, we saw stronger support the kind that's typically needed to pass in a vote towards the $1.2 billion option." The risk-averse Harrell administration made a similar argument when it chose a middle-of-the-road housing levy renewal last year; that renewal passed with 69 percent of the vote.
The public has until April 26 to provide feedback on proposal, which will go to the city council in May.
High status people who aren’t working construction advocate for their preferred configuration of society and municipal government. Shocking revelation, really.