Seattle Bike Blog

Eliminating bike parking requirements for Permanent Supportive Housing just makes sense

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

January 11, 2021

Plymouth Housing’s permanent supportive housing building at 501 Rainier Ave S.

“Not accomplishing anything” is how Tim Parham, the Director of Real Estate Development at Plymouth Housing Group described the current requirement to include a secure bike parking room in all of the buildings it constructs as Permanent Supportive Housing. Plymouth Housing Group is one of the largest providers of very low-income housing in Seattle and maintains 17 buildings with over 1,000 residents.

What exactly is Permanent Supportive Housing? From King County: “Permanent supportive housing is permanent housing for a household that is homeless on entry, where the individual or a household member has a condition of disability, such as mental illness, substance abuse, chronic health issues, or other conditions that create multiple and serious ongoing barriers to housing stability”.

With Seattle and King County now in a homelessness State of Emergency for over five years, building as much housing like this as fast as possible should remain our goal. In 2020, the Office of Housing announced $60 million to be invested in Permanent Supportive Housing to build nearly 600 units, but thousands of people currently living on Seattle’s streets need units like these. Public dollars get combined with private ones to create more housing than direct city investment, but the projects still have to go through most of the same bureaucratic hoops new market-rate development does, even as it saves lives that may have been lost if people continue to live on the street.

District 7 Councilmember Andrew Lewis has proposed a package of land use reforms intended to speed up, and reduce the per-unit costs on, construction of PSH. As a whole, the package of changes could reduce costs for each individual unit of housing by over $47,000, or almost 15%. One of these is the exemption from the bicycle parking requirements that normally apply to multifamily residential development.

Tim Parham told me that an average bike room in a building being built for Permanent Supportive Housing costs Plymouth around $300,000- essentially the cost of a single unit of housing that could change a person’s life. And that bike parking room often takes up some of the most valuable (and therefore most costly) real estate in the entire building- space that could be used for a nurse’s station, for example, or a community room.

He explained that the demographics of the people that Permanent Supportive Housing is intended for tend to skew heavily away from utilizing secure bike parking rooms. If someone living in PSH does have a bike, “it tends to be the most valuable thing they own”, which makes them likely to want to keep their bike in their unit. He told the city council’s Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments that Plymouth is moving toward including hooks for bike storage within the units themselves. At that meeting, Derrick Belgarde of the Chief Seattle Club also echoed the frustration with having to balance a bike parking room against other amenities that they might want to be providing when the proportion of people who would ultimately use that bike room remains relatively low.

I am focusing on the bike parking aspect here for obvious reasons, but the legislation would also remove Permanent Supportive Housing buildings from all design review, also a prime cause for delay in getting housing built. You can read about all aspects of the legislation here. The city council’s select committee on homelessness met to discuss the bill in mid-December and will be picking it up again with another meeting later this month; there will be a public hearing on the proposal on Wednesday January 27, specific meeting details still pending. Now is the time to contact your councilmembers about supporting this proposal that could save lives.

tags: affordable housing, bike parking

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WA Court of Appeals hears arguments in Missing Link case

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

January 9, 2021

The legal fight between the City of Seattle and the coalition of Ballard businesses fighting the completion of the Burke Gilman trail’s Missing Link on Shilshole Ave NW moved ahead Friday morning as oral arguments were heard in the Washington Division I Court of Appeals. This marks the latest legal step in a process that has been going on for over eleven years as the legal grounds that the “Ballard Coalition” are able to contest the validity of the City of Seattle’s process to construct the 1.4 mile missing segment become narrower and narrower.

WIthout the Missing Link, people biking on Shilshole continue to face dangerous conditions.

Matthew Cohen, the lawyer representing the Cascade Bicycle Club in the litigation on the side of the City, told me after the hearing that he was “hopeful” that a ruling would be in their favor and that “the City and Cascade have the better of the arguments”.

There are a lot of different issues that both parties are asking the appeals court to deal with in this case. The argument Friday primarily revolved around two of them. Perhaps the biggest one is a new issue that the City has raised in this appeal: that the Missing Link should never have been subject to SEPA review at all.

While still contending that “the FEIS adequately analyzed and disclosed the Project’s potential significant impacts”, the city cites the fact that in 2015, the City Council modified the city’s SEPA code to exempt all “addition of bicycle lanes, paths and facilities, and pedestrian walks and paths including sidewalk extensions”, including those to be constructed on private property. Previous designs for the Missing Link did include private easements, but the current design does not.

The Ballard coalition contends it is “far too late” to introduce this line of argument, a fact that Judge Stephen Dwyer, one of the judges hearing the appeal, pushed back on quite a bit, suggesting that “retroactivity” wasn’t even relevant in the case. If the project becomes exempt at any time during the process then that’s all that is relevant. But he also suggested the City had engaged in “subterfuge” by not bringing forward an argument that it was exempt under SEPA even as it moved forward with a full EIS. “You want us to take the hit for the city’s dirty deeds”, he said, suggesting that if the project was truly exempt then his hands would be tied.

The other major issue in the case is whether there has been a violation of the “appearance of fairness doctrine” when Seattle’s deputy Hearing Examiner at the time, Ryan Vancil, ruled against the Ballard Coalition in upholding the EIS while he was applying for the job of Hearing Examiner, which requires city council approval. Councilmember Rob Johnson participated in his job interview, and the Coalition notes he was “a well-known bicycle advocate”. (Many “well known bicycle advocates” don’t necessarily support the current proposed design for the Missing Link.) The Superior Court declined to take up this claim, noting that setting that precedent would “impose a presumption that would taint virtually all decision making by [the hearing examiner]”.

The Ballard Coalition also contends the City is in violation of a court order to not proceed with constructing any portion of the trail by constructing a portion on Market Street, but the City contends that the Market Street Multimodal improvements project, which rebuilt the street to include what will become the trail, has “independent utility”, which is certainly true.

There are other issues raised in the appeal on either side, and as we have seen in the past, a ruling against the City on any one of them would be enough to add additional years of delay to the project. The Ballard Coalition’s brief tells the court “this matter should be remanded to SDOT to prepare a new EIS, or in the alternative, remanded to the City for a new evidentiary hearing before a new Examiner”, which presumably would add years and set up the potential for further appeal.

For now, we wait for a ruling from the court of appeals, which has no deadline to be issued; the earliest we might expect it is probably late Spring. In the meantime, the public health hazard that is the current Missing Link continues. SDOT maintains a commitment to build the trail, but says they do not anticipate starting construction earlier than 2022.

An Abbreviated Timeline of Missing Link Litigation
2008: SDOT issued first SEPA Determination of Non-significance (DNS), Ballard coalition appeals.
2011: SDOT issued a revised DNS, also appealed.
2012: SDOT issued a third revised DNS, appealed. Seattle Hearing Examiner orders a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)
2017: SDOT issues full EIS, Ballard coalition appeals it.
2018: Seattle Hearing Examiner rules EIS adequate; Ballard Coalition appeals ruling to King County Superior Court, which rules that the EIS is almost entirely adequate but does not fully account for certain economic impacts.
2019: Both the Ballard Coalition and the City file an appeal in the Washington Court of Appeals. The City issues an addendum to the EIS which includes the requested economic analysis even as the City appeals that ruling.

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Bike and pedestrian advisory boards: find Stay Healthy Streets funds elsewhere

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

January 7, 2021

Update: this post has been changed to clarify that any changes to Lake Washington Boulevard or Golden Gardens Park Road are not necessarily off the table but are not part of the permanent Stay Healthy Streets process.

A large majority of the membership of both the bicycle and pedestrian advisory boards on Wednesday night signaled to the Seattle Department of Transportation that they weren’t okay with a proposal to fund permanent improvements on 20 miles of Stay Healthy Streets by diverting funds from existing bike projects.

SDOT is asking to divert partial funding for 2.6 miles of neighborhood greenway projects, as we reported last month. The two boards asked the department to look for other funding sources. The decision ultimately rests with the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, though presumably the opinion of the two modal boards will carry significant weight; the levy oversight committee will take up the issue in early February. The fate of the Stay Healthy Streets program if the request is denied is not yet clear.

In its presentation last night, SDOT’s neighborhood greenways program manager Summer Jawson, laid out the first steps that SDOT is taking this year to fulfill the promise made last summer to make twenty miles of Stay Healthy Streets permanent, but did not provide a huge amount of detail to the boards about what exactly those permanent improvements are going to look like. Those details will be worked out in through community outreach, she said. This was also another likely factor in the board’s vote not to okay the funding swap: it wasn’t entirely clear what the city will even be funding yet.

Ecoblocks, like the ones currently barricaded in front of two of Seattle’s police precincts, were suggested to be the most likely way that intersections along Stay Healthy Streets would receive protection. That’s likely to be the biggest line item for the projects.

Ecoblocks in front of the East Police Precinct.

The SDOT presentation included a variety of images of street treatments (most of which seem fairly temporary) and emphasized that they will be conducing more outreach than they “normally would do” on a neighborhood greenway project to receive a large amount of community buy-in to keep the program successful. The original Stay Healthy Streets, rolled out in the first month of the pandemic, were chosen as neighborhood greenways in part because some outreach had already been done when those facilities were installed.

Some concepts shown for permanent Stay Healthy Streets.

Jawson also announced that SDOT was prioritizing some new streets that have not yet been Stay Healthy Streets, including 0.7 miles in Georgetown, 0.4 miles in South Park (both neighborhoods currently dealing with a lot of cut-through traffic due to the West Seattle Bridge closure) and 0.1 miles in Little Brook in NE Seattle. These streets were prioritized based on concerns coming directly from community, she said. The South Park and Little Brook projects will include additional segments that only have neighborhood greenway treatments but aren’t Stay Healthy Streets.

In the next few months, SDOT will also be conducting community outreach to determine what the first current Stay Healthy Streets to be converted to permanent fixtures will look like. Those are the Greenwood SHS on 1st Ave NW, and the Alki Keep Moving Street on Beach Drive SW. Other Keep Moving Streets like Lake Washington Boulevard and Golden Gardens will not be considered for permanent status in the Stay Healthy Streets program, but may see changes via other avenues.

SDOT does appear to be moving fast to implement all of the 20 miles of permanent Stay Healthy Streets this year, but the potential roadblock on funding could slow them down.

SDOT’s current timeline for Stay Healthy Streets

Also included in the resounding vote by the joint pedestrian and bicycle advisory boards was a sentiment they sent to SDOT that the more intensive traffic diversion treatments being considered for Stay Healthy Streets should become the de facto baseline with all neighborhood greenway projects. There was a general consensus that the approach being taken with Stay Healthy Streets should have been the approach with neighborhood greenways from the very start, even if that’s not immediately able to be implemented.

Seattle has approximately 50 miles of neighborhood greenways, but with the new proposed projects in Georgetown and South Park, it looks like over 30 miles of neighborhood greenways won’t have the same improvements that Stay Healthy Streets do at the end of 2021.

We should expect more information on which of the remaining Stay Healthy Streets (after Greenwood and Alki) are to be selected to get made permanent in the next few months.

tags: keep moving streets, stay healthy streets

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Senator Saldaña proposes $2 billion in statewide multimodal investments

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

January 6, 2021

During the last state legislative session in 2020, Steve Hobbs (D-Lake Stevens), chair of the State Senate’s transportation committee, released his latest version of the “Forward Washington” transportation package. The list of proposed projects to receive funding in the package totaled nearly $15 billion, and over half of that was proposed to go to “improving” state highways, not counting court-mandated spending on removing culverts statewide to improve fish habitat. That included dozens of projects with the sole purpose of expanding highway capacity, as well as projects like the $1.8 billion US 2 trestle rebuild that expand highways in the process of replacing aging infrastructure. It was not able to be passed by the end of the short legislative session.

Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-37

The Seattle Times reports this week that Senator Rebecca Saldaña (D-Seattle,Renton) is proposing an alternate plan that includes fewer highway expansion projects and shifts dollars to more sustainable transportation investments. Most notably, it would include $2 billion for multimodal transportation grants, projects that are shovel-ready but haven’t been able to receive funding due to the heavy highway bias of statewide transportation spending.

The Saldaña proposal would span twelve years: evenly split among six two-year transportation budgets, that would amount to $333 million per biennium for transit, walking, and biking projects. Governor Inslee’s proposed 2021-2023 budget only provided about $115 million, even with a one-time $20 million boost to pedestrian and bicycle grant program. A $2 billion investment over 12 years would absolutely be the biggest multimodal investment that has ever been made at the state level.

The spending plan does include $1.4 billion for the US 2 trestle, a project in Steve Hobbs’s district that is clearly included in the package as a compromise, but projects like $259 million to widen SR-18 in Issaquah are not included and many other projects to expand highway capacity are absent. It also includes only $450 million for the I-5 bridge between Washington and Oregon; this is likely not going to be the full amount for the project if the latest version of the bridge includes as much highway expansion as the previous iteration, the Columbia River Crossing. Hobbs’s 2020 proposal would have allocated $3 billion for it.

The spending plan in Senator Saldana’s proposed package

The Saldaña proposal acknowledges that we are currently underfunding badly needed local pedestrian, biking, and transit projects. Prior to the Governor’s extra funding being announced, WSDOT expected to only be able to fund 39 out of 232 projects that requested funding from either the Safe Routes to Schools grant program or the Pedestrian and Bicyclist program in the next two years. Local programs like this will make the difference in allowing people to make trips by biking, walking, or taking transit when they might not have otherwise. The shift away from focusing the transportation package on expanding state highway routes is huge.

The senate transportation committee now includes a very progressive contingent of Democrats on transportation issues. In addition to Saldaña, who is vice-chair, the committee has Joe Nguyen (White Center) and newly elected T’Wina Nobles (Tacoma) who is replacing anti-transit Republican Steve O’Ban, who also served on the transportation committee.

Getting a proposal like this passed during the legislature’s first all-remote session will be a heavy lift, and it has to compete with a coming update to the Hobbs transportation package that will likely hand out highway expansion packages to nearly every legislative district at the expense of needed statewide active transportation investments. But the fact that a more progressive proposal like this is even in the mix at all is a huge win.

tags: 2021 legislature, rebecca saldana

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From the beginning, Seattle ‘jaywalker’ stings were used to arrest poor people

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 5, 2021

May 16, 1939 Seattle Daily Times photo.

In the decade between 1924 and 1934, the number of people dying in traffic collisions in Seattle each year increased 250% from 48 to 121. About 70% of those killed were people walking.

By the end of the 1930s, Seattle decided that something needed to change. So the city’s Traffic and Safety Council partnered with the Seattle Police Department to crack down on bad traffic behavior as part of a major public safety campaign called “100 Deathless Days.” The city would publicly count the days between traffic deaths, encouraging everyone to work together to go a full 100 days without a single death.

They didn’t make it. And as each campaign ended with a death, they would start again from zero. And again. And again. As they reached their fifth campaign just five weeks after the start of the first one, they started to narrow their focus on the real problem: Jaywalkers.

Newspapers closely tracked the Deathless Days campaigns.

“We can’t have the rest of the year deathless if pedestrians are going to invite death by jaywalking,” Seattle Police Captain Joseph E. Prince told the Seattle Daily Times. He was preparing his officers for a major series of jaywalking stings during the summer of 1939, instructing officers that “pedestrians must share equal responsibility with drivers.”

The Seattle Daily Times ran a huge headline June 23 proclaiming “16 JAILED IN DRIVE ON JAYWALKERS!” It was the first highly-publicized jaywalking enforcement action, or “drive” as police called it back then. But dig a little deeper, and it starts to feel like maybe jaywalking wasn’t really the reason these particular individuals were stopped. The paper listed the names, ages and occupations of each person stopped. It also noted that of the 16 people arrested, only five were able to pay the $5 bail. Those who couldn’t pay were listed as “laborers” and had to stay in jail.

But incredibly, locking up poor people didn’t stop or even slow the steady stream of people being injured or killed by cars in Seattle. So they did it again a few weeks later, arresting 47 people this time. News stories refer to many jaywalking “drives” throughout 1939 and into the early 1940s.

But no matter how many poor people they arrested, the constant deadly collisions just wouldn’t stop. So Chair of the Traffic and Safety Council Earl F. Campbell decided it was time to get serious about the problem. Seattle needed more serious jaywalking penalties. (more…)

tags: history, jaywalking

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Washington Bikes legislative preview this Thursday

By

Ryan Packer

| Posted

January 4, 2021
The Washington legislature’s long legislative session starts next Monday. This is set to be an important session as lawmakers modify Governor Inslee’s proposal for the biennial budget.

If you were wondering what Washington’s statewide bicycle advocacy organization is planing to push for during this session, Washington Bikes is hosting a “Lunch and Learn” session this Thursday at noon to discuss their policy priorities.

Those priorities, from Washington Bikes, are:
- Grow bike and pedestrian funding in the multimodal account in the transportation budget. Washington Bikes is supportive of new, flexible revenue sources for active transportation.
- Protecting and connecting trails statewide. We support the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program’s $140 million funding request.
- Support policies to address inequities in transportation and policing, including measures to decriminalize biking and walking.
- Support measures that will incentivize or lower the barrier to e-bike ownership.
Governor Inslee’s budget already includes an additional $20 million for bike & pedestrian grants, and it looks like there are going to be dueling proposals for a big transportation package that could increase that amount over longer than the next two years.

Legalizing the “safety stop” was a high priority item on Washington Bikes’ 2020 agenda, with the legislature passing the law that allows people on bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs if there are no other vehicles present; it took effect last October. Oregon’s version of the law has been in effect for a year now.

RSVP for the Thursday lunch event here.
tags: 2021 legislature, washington bikes

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