Lake Washington Blvd has been the most-requested street for the city’s car-free and car-light street projects, which started as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the need to create more space for people to safely distance while getting some exercise or fresh air. And now SDOT and Seattle Parks are experimenting with what is basically a five-day-long version of Bicycle Sunday, closing the street to cars between Seward Park and Mount Baker Beach.
The pilot, dubbed a “Keep Moving Street” project, is among the city’s most ambitious projects yet. Unlike the city’s “Stay Healthy Streets,” which follow slow residential neighborhood greenway routes, Lake Washington Blvd is not a particularly low-traffic street, though nearly all homes and destinations have other route options. People can still drive on the street to access their homes and get deliveries, and people are already very familiar with how this works because Bicycle Sunday has been happening every summer for half a century. So there is a lot of community buy-in already.
The street is also a huge and, hopefully, high quality expansion of open space in south Seattle, where the city has long neglected to invest in safe streets and open public space. The existing walking path along the lake is far too skinny for people to pass each other while giving at least six feet of separation, so the open street provides that space. (more…)
The third Peace Peloton ride meets 10 a.m. Saturday at Central Cafe and Juice Bar in the Central District. At noon, the ride will travel ten miles before ending at Fat’s Chicken and Waffles. If you plan to attend, fill out their RSVP so they can tell businesses how many people to expect.
Recruit a critical mass of mission aligned demonstrators on bikes
Take routes through historically Black neighborhoods, landmarks, and points of interest
Support Black owned businesses at the start, along the way, and at the completion of each route
Repeat
RIDE DETAILS
This ride demonstration will be a casual, no drop, round-trip, supported journey through Seattle neighborhoods totaling about 10 Miles with approximately 600 feet of elevation gain. To help expedite the purchase process, please bring cash.
From a presentation on Mayor Durkan’s proposed budget rebalancing (PDF).
Mayor Jenny Durkan and SDOT have paused $58.3 million worth of projects as the department attempts to deal with the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on the municipal budget. The cuts represent about 8% of the department’s adopted budget with safety and transit projects hit much harder than car-centric projects.
The full extent of the pauses is not yet known, though the department did list some specifics in a recent blog post. At least two safety corridors, two Safe Routes to School, six Bicycle Master Plan improvements (half of which are in South Seattle), the community-led Your Voice Your Choice program (mostly safety projects), and a bunch of multimodal and sidewalk projects have been delayed. The City Center Connector Streetcar is paused and, let’s be honest, is probably doomed. And many transit-focused projects in the Seattle Transportation Benefit District have officially been held pending the final I-976 decision.
In comparison, only one arterial paving project has been paused, and it is part of a transit project, too. In several cases, the car-centric parts of paving projects will continue, but the safety and sidewalk elements have been cut. And because Mayor Durkan built almost no bike projects in the first half of her term, these latest delays come right as progress on the city’s bike goals was finally getting under way.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes Segura was already researching the role of policing in traffic enforcement before I started working on this story. So I worked with him over the past week to put this piece together. As the city opens the police budget to scrutiny, it’s vital that we look back to our history to learn how police ever got involved in traffic enforcement in the first place. Before diving into the budget details, Seattle should take a big step back and ask some for foundational questions about the racist web of a criminal justice system we have created and how traffic enforcement is very often the point of entry for Black people and people of color who get caught in it.
Seattle Police cars from the National Police Journal, December 1919.
Protests are happening in Seattle and throughout the world in solidarity to support Black lives. This Civil Rights movement comes from the recent videos and stories of Charleena Lyles, Manuel Ellis, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tony McDade, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown and the endless list of BIPOC lost to police violence #SayTheirNames.
The City of Seattle is one of many cities considering defunding police, but what exactly does that look like within transportation? Police enforcement within transportation has sustained racial inequity. From biking to riding the light rail to taking the bus to walking and to driving, police power is ingrained into every mode of transportation. Here’s the catch though, if you are not Black, Indigenous, and or a Person of Color (“BIPOC”), you haven’t faced what it’s like to be disproportionately targeted by the police just because of the color of your skin. It means you could be facing life or death, and if it isn’t death it’s likely going to be a life burden in some form or way.
What is traffic enforcement?
The most common form of transportation policing can be found within traffic enforcement. And many of the people named above were killed during contacts with police officers that started either genuinely or in the guise of a traffic-related stop.
So why did our society task armed police with traffic enforcement in the first place? Sarah Seo, Associate Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and author of Policing the Open Road, writes that in cities across the country police were called to respond to the quickly rising death, injury tolls, and congestion that came from the introduction and mass production of cars in the 1920s. Seattle was no different, calling for more police to help control traffic around the same time as our last great pandemic.
“One division which is rapidly growing both in volume of business and in importance is the Traffic Division,” writes G.G. Evans in “The Police Force of Seattle, Queen City of the Northwest” in the December 1919 National Police Journal (self-proclaimed as “America’s Greatest Police Magazine). “The enormous increase in the number of automobiles makes the relief of congestion an urgent problem and one requiring traffic attention.” The National Traffic Officers’ Association held its 1919 meeting at Seattle Police headquarters (they would pass a resolution supporting mandatory turn signals on cars).
In that same article, Evans writes that “the country had been infested by a notorious half-breed murderer” and then praises Seattle Police Chief Joel F. Warren for arresting 200 “lewd women” in a “house-cleaning” effort before soldiers from Camp Lewis came to the city for leisure. Just to give you an idea of the horrifically racist and sexist mindset back when Seattle Police was first dramatically expanding their traffic patrol efforts along with police departments across the nation.
During this time cities also justified the widening of roads and more paved roads as a way to solve congestion. Of course induced demand increased congestion only to reinforce the idea of further increasing police forces and further widening roads.
The wave of traffic from cars also brought about a tsunami of traffic laws. By criminalizing dangerous driving, nearly every person who drove became a potential criminal (the flow of traffic is very often well above the speed limit, for example). By then outlawing jaywalking, nearly every person who walked became a potential criminal, too. This all raised serious constitutional questions, especially related to the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” For example, a traffic violation has become enough probable cause to stop people, question them, search their cars (or pockets) and run their names through police computers. At any point, something entirely unrelated to traffic can happen. Officers could mistakenly think (or claim to think) the person was reaching for a gun (Philando Castile), officers could not appreciate the tone of the person they stopped and get violent (Sandra Bland), officers could spot something in the backseat they claim is related to drug use, officers could discover that the person has a warrant out from some previous case or from unpaid tickets, etc. There are so many ways a simple traffic stop can turn into something much bigger, whether that’s immediate violence or getting trapped in the criminal justice system. (more…)
Lime’s green bikes are gone, but now the company owns JUMP and its formerly-competing red bikes.
Lime has relaunched e-assist bike share in Seattle, about six weeks after pulling their newly-acquired red JUMP bikes from the streets following a major investment deal with Uber.
There are far fewer bikes hitting the streets than were available before. At its peak, there were nearly 10,000 shared bikes in operation in Seattle, and the city’s permit structure anticipated as many as 20,000 bikes back when multiple companies were competing for users just a couple years ago. Lime is only bringing 500 bikes to start with, but said that number could “grow based upon demand,” according to a press release. The price has also gone up substantially from $0 to unlock plus 25 cents per minute to $1 to unlock plus 36 cents per minute. So a 30-minute ride costs $10.80.
Though Lyft has applied for a permit to launch a competing bike share service in Seattle, there has been no indication that the company intends to follow through. So JUMP is unlikely to have competitors, at least until the city starts to permit scooters as it hopes to do soon. That permit has been tied up in litigation, though the Seattle Hearing Examiner ruled in the city’s favor May 28. It’s not yet known if there will be further appeals.
For now, the bikes are only available through the Uber app. The service area still includes the entire city limits.
Lime killed their own e-bike service at the end of 2019. Then in early May, Uber made a significant investment in Lime at a dramatically-reduced valuation. As part of the deal, Lime took on Uber’s JUMP bike share service, previously known as Social Bicycles. Lime immediately pulled the existing bikes from service and scrapped them. But they promised a fleet of new JUMP bikes were coming.
As massive protests against racist and brutal policing pass the half-month mark, the City Council has passed some significant limits on police weaponry and use of chokeholds. The Council is also developing major changes to the city budget through new revenue from a potential new tax on large businesses and through cuts to the existing police budget. There’s a long way to go and a lot of work left to do, but the Council is so far pointing in the right direction.
So how about the region’s transportation advocacy organizations? The protests have made many individuals and organizations look at themselves and question their own roles in maintaining or fighting systemic, institutionalized racism. Here’s what Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Cascade Bicycle Club, Transportation Choices Coalition and Bike Works have said in recent weeks: (more…)
Lake Washington Blvd has been the most-requested street for the city’s car-free and car-light street projects, which started as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the need to create more space for people to safely distance while getting some exercise or fresh air. And now SDOT and Seattle Parks are experimenting with what is basically a five-day-long version of Bicycle Sunday, closing the street to cars between Seward Park and Mount Baker Beach.
