Seattle Bike Blog

Under new policy, Seattle Police should no longer stop people for biking without a helmet

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 18, 2022
Seattle Police should no longer pull people over simply for riding a bicycle without wearing a helmet, according to a new department policy.

“These violations do not have a direct connection to the safety of other individuals on the roads, paths, or sidewalks,” wrote SPD Chief Adrian Diaz in a letter (PDF) to Seattle Inspector General Lisa Judge about the policy changes. In addition to bicycle helmet violations, officers have also been instructed to cease stopping people for driving with expired or missing vehicle registration, or driving with low-level violations like stuff hanging from the rear-view mirror or non-obstructing windshield cracks.

All of these violations are still illegal and can be enforced, they just can’t be the primary reason for officers to initiate a stop. So if an officer stops someone for riding through a red light, for example, they can tack on the helmet ticket as well.

These changes came out of a process that Inspector General Judge initiated last year, Publicola reported:

The announcement comes after months of discussions between the police, the Office of Inspector General, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and civil rights and police oversight groups. Judge organized the conversations herself last year, when she wrote a letter to Diaz urging him to consider removing police from low-level traffic enforcement. “Stopping a person is a significant infringement on civil liberty and should be reserved for instances when a person is engaged in criminal conduct that harms others,” Judge wrote. “Stops for government-created requirements like car tabs, with nothing but a potential monetary penalty, do not justify the risk to community or to officers.”

In Diaz’s letter, he cites the fact that the King County Board of Health is considering abolishing the helmet code anyway. The Board was very close to taking this action during its November meeting, but decided to delay the vote. King County’s helmet law is very rare, and a large coalition has formed to urge a repeal. There are many concerns about the unintended consequences of the law, but biased policing is one of the biggest.

“In Seattle, nearly half of all helmet citations since 2017 were issued to people experiencing homelessness,” the Helmet Law Working Group wrote in a lengthy 2021 report. “Since 2003, Black cyclists in Seattle have received citations at a rate 3.8 times higher, Indigenous cyclists 2.2 times higher, and Hispanic/Latino cyclists 1.4 times higher than white cyclists. Differences in helmet use between populations cannot explain these disparities.”

Hopefully the Board of Health takes this as yet another reason to move forward with their repeal because now there is a confusing mismatch in King County where the largest municipal law enforcement agency has effectively made biking without a helmet a secondary offense but other agencies still treat it as a primary offense. It’s time for the county’s helmet regulations to come into alignment with pretty much everywhere else in the country. This law is a distraction taking up a lot of energy that would be better put to use building safer streets that prevent collisions from happening in the first place.
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tags: adrian diaz, helmet laws, king county board of health, publicola, spd

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WA Transportation Secretary: Further freeway expansion is ‘a dead end’

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 12, 2022
The number of people killed while walking or biking in Washington is headed in the wrong direction. Images from Secretary Millar’s presentation (PDF).

Washington Transportation Secretary Roger Millar argued against further highway expansion during his State of Transportation presentation to the House Transportation Committee this week. Instead, he argued for “a resilient response” to the state’s major challenges, including climate change, inequitable traffic impacts and increasing traffic injuries and deaths.

“We are a Target Zero state, and we’re going the wrong way,” said Millar. “The data shows our system isn’t safe. It kills people, and we need to invest to stop that.” WSDOT estimates that the monetary cost of collisions, injuries and deaths is about $14 billion per year. Of course, a life is more important than money.

Meanwhile, the state is investing less than half of what it should be investing to maintain existing infrastructure. The state has been building a lot of new and expanded infrastructure, which only makes it more difficult to maintain the infrastructure the state already has. As that new infrastructure comes due for maintenance, the backlog gets that much worse. At this point, the state would need to spend about a billion dollars more per year than it is currently spending just to tread water.

One part of the solution is to stop trying to expand highways to solve congestion. WSDOT gave a rough estimate that it would cost upwards of $115 billion over ten years to add enough lanes to freeways to allow people to drive the speed limit at all times. That would require as much as $2.50 per gallon in additional gas taxes. This rough estimate does not even include all the costs associated with increasing local and connector roads to meet the induced demand from the newly-widened freeways.

“Addressing congestion through adding lanes to the Interstate system is not financially feasible, it’s not economically feasible, it’s not environmentally feasible. It’s just not going to happen,” said Millar. “We need to think about doing things differently.” He even said that the state’s path of continually expanding freeways to solve congestion has “come to a dead end.” (more…)
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tags: 2022 legislature, house transportation committee, roger millar, wsdot

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WA Bikes: ‘There’s opportunity abound’ in short 60-day state legislative session

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 10, 2022
State legislators seemed determined to pass a major transportation funding bill during the 2021 session, but the focus on highway spending and backwards ideas like a tax on bicycles ultimately helped stall the effort until the session ran out of time. There was even talk of a special session to get the effort passed, but that fortunately never happened.

Governor Jay Inslee picked Steve Hobbs, the previous Senate Transportation Committee Chair, to serve as Secretary of State after Kim Wyman joined the Biden administration. Hobbs was a major force pulling the funding talks backwards, proposing a new bicycle tax, cutting the House’s proposed multimodal investments and adding millions for highway expansion projects.

Marko Liias is the new Senate Transportation Chair, setting off a surge of hope that a quality transportation funding package, along with other needed transportation policies, will be possible this year. Liias has long received glowing endorsements from safe streets, bicycling and transit advocacy organizations. But it’s a short session, so legislators and advocates will need to move quickly to get it done in time.

“With a new Senate Transportation Committee Chair, and momentum from work started in 2021 on a state transportation revenue bill, there’s opportunity abound,” wrote WA Bikes State Policy Director Alex Alston in an email to supporters.

Washington Bikes has published their goals for the session, which include increasing the funding for biking, walking and transit, addressing inequities in transportation (including inequitably dangerous streets), e-bike incentives (if electric cars get them, why not electric bikes?), and updating the Growth Management Act to include climate resiliency. That’s ambitious but achievable list for the short session. You can help the effort by signing up for the WA Bikes Legislative Week of Action February 1–5.

From WA Bikes: (more…)
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tags: 2022 legislature, alex alston, marko liias, washington bikes

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Pedersen remains City Council Transportation Chair – UPDATED

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 5, 2022
Councilmember Alex Pedersen (D4) will continue as Chair of the Transportation and Seattle Public Utilities Committee, the City Council voted Tuesday. Dan Strauss (D6) will remain as Vice-Chair, and Lisa Herbold (D1) and Tammy Morales (D2) will remain as committee members. Kshama Sawant (D3) will take former Councilmember Lorena González’s committee member seat, a role Sawant played for many years throughout the 2010s.

The Transportation Committee has been relatively quiet in the past couple years under Pedersen. According to the City Clerk’s Legistar calendar, the committee only held 9 out of a potential 24 regular meetings in 2020 thanks to a 168-day meeting cancellation streak between March 4 and August 19 (note that the West Seattle Bridge broke March 23, and there were special meetings about that). The committee stepped it up in 2021 by holding 18 regular meetings.

UPDATE: Councilmember Pedersen reached out to clarify the committee’s 2020 work. March through June, many committees including Transportation conducted their business during full City Council meetings and during full Council briefings, he said. The Committee also focused mostly on the Seattle Transportation Benefit District measure due for voter passage in November 2020. Finally, because committees don’t meet during budget deliberations, the total potential meetings per year is more like 20 or 21 rather than 24. I appreciate the Councilmember’s clarifications, and I can see how my original text came off as more critical than I had intended. 2020 was obviously a very unusual year.

But the next two years will need to be much busier because there is a lot of work to do to watchdog the final years of the Move Seattle Levy investments and prepare city transportation plans ahead of whatever transportation funding measure replaces Move Seattle in 2024. Anyone who has been snoozing on Transportation Committee business (*author looks into mirror*) will need to start paying much closer attention.

Seattle has an enormous opportunity to be a national leader in sustainable transportation with a bold ballot measure in 2024, a high-turnout Presidential election year. Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Transportation Committee will both have opportunities to craft this measure, and they won’t have a ton of time to do so. Committees could see another shake-up in early 2024 after the 2023 City Council election, but much of the transportation measure will likely be developed by then.

Here is the committee membership roster for (likely) the next two years:
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tags: alex pedersen, transportation committee

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South Park community group seeks to reclaim neighborhood land from a harmful, redundant highway

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

December 30, 2021
All images from Cultivate South Park.

South Park has some of the most harmful air quality of any residential neighborhood in Seattle and King County, and it doesn’t take long to figure out where a lot of it comes from: The freeway that splits the neighborhood in two.

It’s a story that has been repeated many times across the city and the nation. Low-income communities and communities of color are often located in the areas with the worst air quality and the most dangerous roadways. This is not an accident. Perhaps no neighborhood better represents our region’s environmental racism more starkly than South Park.

“The cumulative impacts of these environmental burdens result in a 13-year lower life expectancy for South Park residents compared with other Seattle neighborhoods,” according to Cultivate South Park, a “resident-led Asset-Based Community Development organization.” But it doesn’t need to be this way. South Park is a flourishing community that deserves clean air and safe, connected streets, and Cultivate South Park is taking on the biggest barrier to both of these goals: SR-99.

“What if we were to close this segment of 99 and reclaim 40 acres of land for affordable housing, community owned businesses, parks and amenities that serve the people of South Park?” That’s the bold and very exciting question at the center of the organization’s Reconnect South Parks proposal. With leadership at the national, state and city levels all talking about reducing the community harm caused by past freeway projects, this project is the perfect opportunity to stand by those words. (more…)
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tags: cultivate south park, reconnect south park, south park, sr 99

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Key section of Georgetown to South Park Trail moving forward alongside a new dog park

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

December 28, 2021
Concept design (PDF)

A gravel cut-through in Georgetown near Boeing Field will become a dog park and trail corridor, providing a key piece of the community-led Georgetown to South Park Trail. If all goes according to schedule, the park and trail connection should begin construction in the summer and open in 2023.

The City Council’s Transportation and Utilities Committee voted before the holiday break to transfer the former “flume” property from Seattle City Light to SDOT and the Parks Department. The long and skinny property once housed a conveyance that transported water from the Duwamish River to the Georgetown steam plant, but it has been essentially unused since that plant closed in 1975. As part of the deal, City Light will also pay for soil remediation.

The new park will lie at the middle point of the Georgetown to South Park Trail, planned to connect from near S Bailey Street and Ellis Ave S to the South Park Bridge. Routing the trail through the new park will require a couple extra turns, but it will likely be more pleasant than the moderately busy intersection of Ellis and E Marginal Way S. The project is the result of a community-led effort that brought together three different city agencies. That is no small feat. Kudos to Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, who have been working for years to make this trail and park a reality.
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tags: duwamish valley safe streets, flume property, georgetown, georgetown to south park connection, parks and recreation, sdot, seattle city light, transportation and utilities committee

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