In the lead up to next week’s vote, the Let’s Move Seattle campaign has been focused on the exciting and new elements of the nine-year transportation levy proposal: Seven new rapid bus lines to all parts of town, Safe Routes to School projects at every single public school, up to 250 blocks of new sidewalks and replacing our city’s final timber-supported bridge on Fairview Ave N before an earthquake takes it down for us.

The expanded levy will also grow exciting work to provide more transportation options for everyone, like dramatically expanding the city’s ability to implement transit-efficiency projects, connecting our scattered bicycle route network, replacing old street corners with ADA accessible curb ramps and much more.

As we wrote recently, the brilliance of Move Seattle is that it makes thousands of relatively small investments that add up to create a multimodal city. It doesn’t rely on questionable megaprojects like Bertha or even the massive remake of Mercer Street. Instead, it goes all in on expanding transportation choices in every neighborhood, maintaining the roads we have and improving safety and transportation access for everyone.

Seattle needs more smart transportation investments if we have any hope of helping more people and goods get around our city. We have a lot of catching up to do.

But even if you aren’t convinced by all this, voting “no” on Seattle’s Prop 1 is also a vote to slaughter the city’s current transportation budget, including the kinds of work we have simply come to consider basic maintenance. Because the Bridging the Gap levy (“BTG”) expires in December whether we replace it or not.

To give you the doomsday version of what your “no” vote would mean (not even counting the 16 seismic upgrades for earthquake-vulnerable bridges included in Move Seattle), let’s look at some of the big stuff we lose without a levy in place: (more…)