The Seattle Department of Transportation has released its proposed spending plan for the proceeds from a $20 vehicle license fee (VLF) that the City Council approved last fall. After an outreach process where the department received feedback from around 20 organizations and boards, it’s sending these funding recommendations back to the Council early next month. The VLF is expected to raise around $3.6 million in 2021 after it takes effect mid-year and around $7 million per year starting in 2022.

In budget discussions last year, a bloc of three councilmembers proposed allocating the entire amount toward bridge maintenance. A report from the city auditor had highlighted a spending gap on bridge maintenance funding: average spending on bridge maintenance of $6.6 million per year compared to a conservative estimate of $34 million per year. This plan would only spend around $2 million on bridge maintenance, in the “strong bridges and structures” category, which has been broadened to include stairways and other “essential roadway structures”.  That’s approximately one-quarter of the revenue generated.

But a large percentage of the overall revenue is still earmarked for transportation maintenance. 28% of the revenue would go toward “safe sidewalks”, which includes restriping crosswalks, replacing crossing beacons, and repairing existing sidewalks. Money in this category would also be used to fund ADA curb ramps, which the city is under a court-mandated order to do. Another 10% would go to “active transportation maintenance”, which includes repainting bike lanes, upgrading barriers on protected lanes, and bike signal improvements.

Another 28% of revenue would be dedicated to safe streets through Vision Zero projects. Vision Zero projects run the gamut in scope, from spot improvements at a single intersection to protected bike lane installation on an entire corridor. The department was already on track to complete all of the VZ projects (12-15) that it promised to deliver with the Move Seattle levy, but the process for prioritizing those remains opaque and we’ve seen specific projects during the Durkan administration watered down.

Another 7% would be allocated to planning, which includes the development of a citywide multimodal plan. The city doesn’t lack in plans, just the vision to implement them and frequently (but not always) the funds to complete them. The details we’ve seen so far on the development of a citywide multimodal plan actually seem to get us farther away, with the bicycle master plan getting dismantled in the name of identifying “critical segments”.

3% of the funds would be kept in reserve, rounding out the entire pie.

How we got to this point is not completely clear. According to the results of SDOT’s outreach, the highest rated criteria for prioritization in the process was increasing equity in Seattle’s transportation system, with increasing safety close behind. While reducing the maintenance backlog was prioritized highly by stakeholders in the “transportation and labor” space, it didn’t come out on top when the results were weighted across the entire group of feedback providers. But equity and safety are core values at the Seattle Department of Transportation, as well as sustainability and mobility.

David Seater, former chair of the Pedestrian Advisory Board and a participant in the outreach process for this spending plan, told me that the public outreach was frustrating, particularly the idea of having to choose between safety and equity. “This process seems like a huge amount of overhead for what is a relatively small amount of money in the context of the SDOT budget. SDOT already has a huge, rigorously prioritized backlog of work and we should just be following that as more money becomes available”, he told me.

Ultimately the issue is that we’re trying to get too many things from one $20 vehicle license fee. If we need the entire amount here to fund bridge maintenance so we don’t have to spend more later, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for other revenue sources to fund all of the other urgently needed priorities outlined in this spending plan. The size of the pie is a bigger issue than the individual slices.

SDOT has a survey on these spending categories through March 30th at 9am.

When the entirety of state route 99, Aurora Ave N, was repaved by the Washington State Department of Transportation in 2018 and 2019, many safety advocates saw a missed opportunity. While actual roadway is state-owned, Seattle is responsible for taking the lead on changes to the street like channelization and safety improvements. While spot improvements have happened along Aurora, there was not a comprehensive effort made to redesign one of Seattle’s most dangerous streets. As Bart Treece, communications manager at WSDOT, described it in 2019, “Ahead of this pavement preservation project, we did approach the city, but nothing materialized on their end.”

A new group calling itself the Aurora Reimagined Coalition seeks to ensure that opportunities like that aren’t passed up again. SDOT is set to receive a state grant funding a $2 million corridor plan. According to SDOT Director Sam Zimbabwe, the department expects to get to a 30% design on the entire Aurora corridor with this funding, and to a 90% design on at least one segment, setting the department up to be shovel-ready when funding becomes available to actually make changes. The coalition wants to ensure that someone is pushing SDOT to make Aurora into a “21st Century ‘main street’ for our neighborhoods, a thriving street where people feel comfortable walking and shopping and that reconnects neighborhoods on both sides of Aurora”. The group is having their kickoff meeting tonight.

This month, SDOT announced that the first speed limit reductions on Aurora, a 30 mph limit between 85th and 109th Streets and a 35 mph limit between 115th St and the northern city limits at 145th Street, would be in place by mid-April. This is a slightly less significant change than we reported SDOT was requesting from WSDOT back in February, where the entire limit would be set at 30 north of 85th Street. Timelines for future phases in speed reductions, as suggested by SDOT’s proposal, remain unclear at this point. But Aurora will need significant changes to its design to make it as safe as it could be.

As a more immediate ask, the group is pushing for the curbside lane along Green Lake Park to be converted into walking and rolling space in place of the muddy dirt path (and no sidewalk) that currently exists there. Earlier this month, we reported on the fact that SDOT had already drawn up plans for this concept last Summer, and the department confirmed that it was still on the table but lacked funding, among other factors. With the soon-to-be completed protected bike lanes along the east side of Green Lake, adding a safe place to bike on the west side would complete a full route around Green Lake Park. They have a petition going to support this specific change.

But the longer-term vision for comprehensive changes to Aurora looms large. In ten years, 22 people have been killed while trying to use Aurora Ave to get where they were going, the majority of them walking. Aurora is a public safety crisis that the City has evaded responsibility on for far too long.

The Coalition so far includes long-time advocates for safety on Aurora like Lee Bruch of Licton-Haller Greenways and Brock Howell & Tom Lang of Green Lake & Wallingford Safe Streets.

The Aurora Reimagined Coalition’s kickoff is tonight at 7pm, on Zoom. Click here for the Zoom meeting, or call (253) 215-8782, meeting ID 881 5043 1673.