Seattle Bike Blog

Safety, maintenance compete for slice of council-approved car tab revenue

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 24, 2021

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.

SDOT’s proposed breakdown of spending from the $20 VLF.

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.

The results of the “community evaluation process” for the $20 VLF. (Click to enlarge)

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.

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Construction starts on Uptown bike connection paired with Climate Pledge Arena

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 23, 2021

Construction work has started on a separated bike corridor in the Uptown neighborhood as part of a set of transportation projects required to be installed by the grand opening of former Key Arena, now Climate Pledge Arena. A grand opening date hasn’t yet been announced, but is still set for this fall.

First set of concrete curbs for the protected bike lane on Queen Anne Ave N near Mercer Street.

Concrete curbs being installed near Republican Street on Queen Anne Ave N.

The two-way cycletrack goes out of its way to accommodate traffic management for other types of travel in Uptown, with three blocks of Queen Anne Ave N getting bike lanes north of Thomas Street and two blocks of 1st Ave N south of Thomas. The current one-way bike lane on 1st Ave N that’s been in place for the construction of the arena will be gone by the time construction is complete.

Northern segment of the bike lane being installed in conjunction with the arena. (Click to enlarge)

The planned connection between Queen Anne Ave N and 1st Ave N on Thomas Street. (Click to enlarge)

Southern segment of the Uptown bike lane on 1st Ave N north of Denny Way.

North of Mercer Street, the plans fall outside the jurisdiction of the arena’s transportation agreement. The latest we saw for plans for the block between Mercer and Roy Street (where there are paint bike lanes) was a short stub of a bike lane for northbound riders that ends at the MarQueen Hotel’s load and unload zone.

Plans for the terminus of the bike lane for northbound riders north of Mercer Street. (Click to enlarge)

The City is also working on connecting this Uptown cycletrack to the 2nd Ave protected bike lane via Broad Street this year. That lane will run along the western edge of 1st Ave and the northern edge of Broad Street.

Location of the planned cycletrack connecting 1st and Denny with 2nd and Broad. (Click to enlarge)

As for the northern end of the 2nd Ave protected bike lane, we don’t know exactly what the final design is going to look like yet. After negative reaction to the news that all bike traffic south of 2nd Ave and Denny Way would be relocated to the sidewalk, SDOT gave the intersection another look to improve the experience. A design shown last year (below) just shows a wider sidewalk.

The relocation of the bike lane here makes way for another southbound travel lane on 2nd Ave which will be the primary exit route for cars to “flush” out of the new 400-car garage at Climate Pledge Arena.

2020 illustration of 2nd Ave and Denny Way (Click to enlarge)

Also planned this year is a big upgrade on the connection between Uptown and the Thomas Street bridge connecting the neighborhood with the Elliott Bay Trail.

Even though the arena is officially planning for a very small percentage of visitors to be arriving by bike (1% when it first opens), the street space being provided to give people a safe option to bike to Uptown for arena events might cause expectations to be exceeded. But more importantly it provides everyone in Seattle a way to access the neighborhood via a safe bike route.

tags: center city bike network, climate pledge arena, uptown

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Aurora Reimagined Coalition seeks to increase public pressure for safety improvements

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 22, 2021

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.

Aurora Ave N near Green Lake

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.

Concept drawing for the Aurora lane conversion along Green Lake. (Green Lake & Wallingford Safe Streets)

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.

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Advocates ask SDOT to examine different options for Beacon Ave bike route

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 19, 2021

Late last year SDOT released early designs for the safe bike route being planned to run nearly the entire length of Beacon Hill, currently scheduled to start construction in 2023. While the route on the northern end of the hill is still being decided by SDOT, we got a pretty clear picture what the department was planning for Beacon Ave south of Jefferson Park golf course. The sidewalk path that winds around the wide median in the center of the street, would be widened by four feet to better accommodate people traveling in both directions.

Latest designs for the center median on Beacon Ave from late 2020. (Click to enlarge)

On a segment of roadway that’s nearly 100 feet, only four additional feet would be provided to allow Beacon Ave to become a primary north-south bike route for people traveling through a large swath of the city.

When this design was presented to the Bicycle Advisory Board last year, several members expressed concern that routing relatively fast-moving bicycle traffic down this center median would not work well, with no separation between people walking and people biking. In January, the board wrote a letter to SDOT. From the letter:

Adding bikes to the Center Median Path crowds a trail that already has a wide variety of users, which has the potential to take this asset away from community members or make it more dangerous for community members. In addition, routing bikes onto this Center Median Path does not facilitate biking as a mode of transportation, for reasons we outline below. The current design prioritizes vehicular traffic and parking. SBAB would like to encourage SDOT to be forward thinking and creative.

The board has asked SDOT to “Analyze the option of adding protected bike lanes to the street and maintaining the Center Median Path for walkers/runners/families”, or, if that’s not feasible, to “explore all creative possibilities for enabling ALL users to share the Center Median Path in a safe, comfortable, intuitive way”.

Now Beacon Hill Safe Streets, the Seattle Neighborhood Greenways affiliate in Beacon Hill, has written a letter to SDOT raising similar issues.

We’re concerned that widening the Beacon Avenue median walking path to accommodate more bicycles will lead to increased conflict between relatively fast bicycles and those walking, jogging, and rolling on the trail, especially on the sections that will have the most use and/or that have a steep grade. When we picture bicycles on this winding, park-like trail, we think of children learning to bike or adults out for a leisurely ride.

The letter asks the department to study an in-street bike lane option.

The design for this section should explore placing a bike lane on either side of the median in the existing street and have the cars move along closer the cars parked there, as has been done on Ravenna Boulevard. The roadway is already wide enough to allow this and also has the advantage of slowing vehicular traffic. This is a design that has already proven to be feasible in North Seattle, avoids conflicts with driveways, and would be less expensive than widening the median. We also would like SDOT to conduct a parking study of the project area. There are long stretches of Beacon Avenue in which the on-street parking is only lightly used. We question whether private property storage is really the best use of three miles of one of our primary arterials in Southeast Seattle.

Both groups are asking SDOT to conduct a parking study to determine how utilized the current parking lanes that run along the outer curb on Beacon Ave. There are also parking spots in the center median in numerous spots that SDOT has previously said would not be reduced.

The Beacon Hill bike route is one of three major bike routes currently moving forward after years of advocacy by the Bicycle Advisory Board and other Seattle bike advocates to improve connections between Southeast Seattle and the rest of the city. Making sure the connections are well-designed is also pretty important.

tags: beacon ave, beacon hill safe streets, sbab

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City transportation electrification “blueprint” includes emissions-free area by 2030

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 17, 2021

Today the City of Seattle has released what it’s calling a “blueprint” to electrify the city’s transportation system, further clarifying the city’s goals around decarbonizing our largest single source of emissions. Among the goals outlined with a 2030 deadline is for the city to create a major area where walking, biking, and transit are the primary modes and goods are delivered by electric or other non-emitting vehicles, and other personal vehicles are restricted.

That goal actually comes directly from a commitment the City made in 2017, when then-Mayor Tim Burgess signed onto a declaration along with eleven other cities from around the world to ensure that a major zone in their city is zero emission by 2030. At the time, Mayor Burgess was quoted alongside Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo as saying, “Responding to climate change’s threat requires big thinking and bold action”. Paris has proceeded with a fundamental reshaping of the city’s streets, with around 30 miles of pop-up bike lanes added in just 2020 that will likely all remain permanent. Seattle built around 2 miles of protected bike lanes last year.

London, another signatory on the 2018 commitment, has already implemented an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) of around 8 miles in the center of the city, and another Low Emission Zone (LEZ) that covers the rest of the city. Vehicles not meeting certain emission standards are charged to enter the zone; this is separate from the congestion charge also in place in London. Emissions policies like this have had already contributed to a reduction of 44% in roadside NO2 levels in Central London between February 2017 and January 2020 and an an expected 13% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Transport Decarbonisation Alliance, C40 cities, and POLIS. These are the public health benefits that come from emissions reduction zones.

Signage in London indicating the ultra low-emission zone. (C40 cities)

In the US, Santa Monica, California is probably the closest example. A pilot project running through this year implemented a voluntary 1-mile emissions-free delivery zone where curb space is reserved for electric delivery vehicles. Personal vehicles used by residents inside the zone are not covered by the voluntary policy.

Mayor Durkan has not referenced the 2017 commitment for an emissions-free zone in the city much if at all during her tenure. A 2018 announcement to study congestion pricing as part of “a vision for a more vibrant downtown with fewer cars, more transit, and less pollution” has not produced anything substantive to date. The update to the 2013 Climate Action Plan released in 2018, included very few concrete strategies to reduce Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) and shift vehicle trips away from single-occupancy vehicle to transit and active transportation. Seattle’s official 2013 goal for VMT is a 20% drop from 2008 levels by 2030, a modest reduction that the city is currently further away from than when we adopted the goal.

Seattle’s vehicle miles travelled trends compared to the goal.

A neighborhood or segment of a neighborhood where most of the cars and trucks permitted to use the streets are delivering goods could amount to one of the biggest shifts of street space to biking and walking ever. Of course, if everyone in Seattle isn’t able to access that emissions-free zone or zones, the impact would be limited and likely inequitable.

The plan spends some time addressing that inequality in the transportation system that our choices continue to reinforce. “Climate justice is a central focus of this plan,” it states. “Our residents and neighbors who are least responsible for climate change and least equipped to adapt, are already disproportionately bearing the health and financial impacts of climate change.” Given that it notes that “residents living in the Duwamish Valley community in South Seattle will die eight years sooner than other Seattle neighborhoods due to air pollution and exposure to environmental toxins”, then that fact should be centered in the urgent task of removing those pollutants, and the emissions that come along with them, from our transportation system.

Among the other 2030 goals in the blueprint is that every single vehicle providing “shared mobility”, including taxis, Uber, Lyft, as well as electric scooter and bike share, is zero-emissions, that 90% of personal trips are in vehicles that are zero-emission, and 30% of goods delivery is completed by zero-emissions vehicles. Having a city-owned fleet that is also 100% zero-emission by 2030 is also a goal. The blueprint states that these “ambitious, yet achievable, goals will accelerate market transformation and make it possible for Seattle to achieve a clean energy future”.

Another plan on the shelf with another set of ambitious goals doesn’t mean much when we aren’t achieving the goals we’ve already set. If we are actually serious about achieving the goals, it’s going to require more specifics and more concrete actions.

tags: center city, climate change, congestion pricing

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Meet Shelly Baldwin, new Director of the Washington Traffic Safety Commission

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

March 16, 2021

Shelly Badwin

The Washington Traffic Safety Commission is a public agency that flies under the radar. In February, the commission got a new leader when Shelly Baldwin, previously the Legislative and Media Relations division director at the WTSC, was appointed head of the commission by Governor Inslee. Last year, the previous Director, Darrin Grondel, who had been appointed to the job by Governor Christine Gregoire in 2012, left to become Vice President of Traffic Safety and Government Relations at The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility.

We sat down with Director Baldwin recently to get a better understanding of the Safety Commission’s role in improving traffic safety in Washington.

Seattle Bike Blog: I guess the first question would just be, tell me a little bit more about your background and how you ended up as the Director.

Director Baldwin: Yeah, you know, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronaut, so I don’t know how I ended up here. I wanted to be a writer growing up, and when I became a grown up, I had a freelance writing situation going on and the commission began hiring me for many of their writing projects. That was back in ’92…So for many years, I enjoyed my association with the commission. I learned a lot about traffic safety, I wrote their grants, I wrote the first Target Zero plan. And then my daughter went to college and I realized I was going to need a little bit more of a steady income, and I was lucky enough to be hired on as a program manager. I took their impaired driving program as my emphasis area and worked in that for maybe seven years. And then as people retired, they asked me to do legislation and their communications, which I did for about seven years before our director, Darrin Grondel left and I applied for the position and I was extremely humbled to have been chosen for it. So that’s about twenty-five years in traffic safety.

Seattle Bike Blog: So you’ve been along for almost all of the Target Zero program.

Director Baldwin: Almost. So in 2000, the director at the time, John Moffitt, had come back with information about what they were doing in Norway, on their Vision, Zero piece, and he said to the team, I am not going to continue to set goals that maybe we can kill X number of people this year, which is 20 less than last year. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that that would be our goal. And he at that point implemented Target Zero, worked with all of the partners to bring them on board and honestly, everybody thought he was crazy for a little bit, probably including his staff…Like zero is never going to happen, why would we set that for our goal? But as we’ve existed in this world and watched successes in Norway, we really think that this is the only appropriate goal to set.

If you’ve seen it, but we do have a video out about why zero is the appropriate goal. It’s basically man-on-the-street interviews across the state asking people just basic questions, how many people do you think are killed in car crashes in Washington, and what do you think the leading causes are, what do you think an appropriate goal is. Most people say, well, can we kill ten thousand? They have no idea how many people actually die in Washington per year.

And then we say, well, what’s the goal for your family? And, you know, that gives them pause. And that’s where I’m at too. I certainly don’t want anybody in my family to ever be killed just because they’re trying to get from one place to another, regardless of what method they’re using. But more than that, there are actually things that we could be doing, if we would make the commitment as a state, to get us there.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the actual Target Zero strategic plan…It’s a big, big plan, but there are sections in there that talk about the most important things we could be doing to reach zero. And those are things that we will always be advocating for, even when they’re not popular.

Seattle Bike Blog: And so how do you describe the Safety Commission’s role in the statewide ecosystem?

Director Baldwin: That’s a really good question. The Safety Commission was formed back in 1967…The federal government required all states to have a highway safety representative appointed by the Governor. And that’s what this position is. There are fifty-four other people like me, who are the head of their traffic safety office and serve as that governor’s representative. But when we were formed, we were a little unique, so most states formed their highway safety office, either as part of their public safety statewide state patrol kind of office or under their DOTs. Washington however took a very different approach, recognizing that traffic safety is a multifaceted issue.

They made us a commission. So we have: the heads of agencies, including department of licensing, department of health, state patrol. superintendent of public instruction, a person who represents counties , a person who represents cities, a person who represents the judiciary…And they form our commission, which makes us super lucky. So we are a commission, we’re twenty-two people big right now. We could possibly be twenty-six people if we filled positions. And yet we’re tasked with eliminating all traffic crashes in the state, so obviously it’s not about simply what we can do. It really is about bringing those commissioners into the fold, letting them provide us direction and also providing them with what traffic safety professionals do and what we learn from the connections we have throughout America. And guiding and building partnerships, so we take charge of the Target Zero plan every three years, we bring all the partners to the table. We have a partners meeting to kick off that probably has, what was our last count, about 500 people that attend. So really, the best thing that we can do is organizing and bringing together lots of different professionals to help us reach our goals.

(more…)

tags: vision zero

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