Stalled Progress: The Struggle to Achieve Vision Zero Amid Rising Fatalities

“WA road deaths jump 10%, reaching 33-year high. What are we doing wrong?” by Nicholas Deshais from The Seattle Times

“Washington Reconsiders 2030 Target Zero Goal in Face of Increasing Traffic Violence” by Ryan Packer for The Urbanist

 “Vision Zero Is About Road Design” by Ryan Packer for The Urbanist

“Grant Request Would Accelerate Complete Streets Investments on State Highways” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist

“SDOT’s Top to Bottom Review of Vision Zero Barely Skims the Surface” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist

“Seattle Sends $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy to the November Ballot” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist

[00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review show and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes.

Well, today I am thrilled to be welcoming Ryan Packer back to the show. Welcome, Ryan!

[00:01:02] Ryan Packer: Thanks for having me, Crystal.

[00:01:04] Crystal Fincher: Ryan is the noted and esteemed reporter for The Urbanist, who is really setting a standard in the state for covering transit mobility, transportation issues - especially beyond the car. And so, I really wanted to take this opportunity today to talk about Vision Zero, which you are probably the reporter in the state who has done the most coverage of this. And so I wanted to just start off by covering - what is Vision Zero?

[00:01:39] Ryan Packer: Ultimately, Vision Zero is a new approach to traffic safety - preventing people from being killed and seriously injured in traffic. But in terms of what Vision Zero actually is in the United States, I think it's more of a marketing term at this point. And so in Washington, we've actually had a goal of completely eliminating both deaths and serious injuries in traffic across the entire state since 2000. And so - it being 2024 - obviously, we haven't made progress toward that goal. We've gone in the opposite direction. We just had new numbers from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission showing that 810 people were killed on our roads last year. As recently as 2014, we were under 500 - and so that number has not headed in the direction that it was supposed to. So I think it can be a little helpful to go back to what was happening in 2000 - and we were basically copying an idea that had originated in Scandinavia, which was this idea of Target Zero - taking a comprehensive look at why crashes happen. And not necessarily trying to prevent every crash from happening, but saying if this is going to happen, how can we reduce the severity? How can we actually make sure that it's not going to leave a devastating impact on people? And so that model has actually worked pretty well over in Scandinavia because it's been kind of actually implemented in terms of designing streets so that If you have a crash, it's not going to lead to a serious or fatal outcome. In the early 2000s, we were actually on a pretty good trajectory in Washington. Between 2000 and 2010, we basically went from around 11th in the country to 4th in terms of the rates of traffic fatalities. So there was some positive momentum - a lot of that was borne out of some changes that we had made. For example, in 1999, Washington lowered the Blood Alcohol Content level for a DUI from 0.1 to 0.08 and saw some gains from that. We had a really effective primary seatbelt law that was passed in 2002, during a period when two-thirds of the people were killed in crashes not wearing seatbelts.

And so there were some gains, but ultimately I think that what happened is the lower hanging fruit was achieved and we kind of were expecting to build on that momentum and be able to actually get to zero when some of the more systemic issues were not actually being dealt with. You go back and look at the original 2000 Traffic Safety Plan, looking at some of the categories in terms of pedestrian safety - we're continually seeing increases in number of people hurt and killed while walking - the first strategy is improving driver and pedestrian safety education. I think it's pretty clear that that has actually not worked - in the past, it's pretty small gains. But then down the list is - challenging cities to plan and design for pedestrians and not just the fast movement of motor vehicles. Well, 24 years later, we can say - No, we haven't done that. We've made some steps, which we can talk about in a minute. But ultimately, we had a goal, but we didn't actually do all the things that we could see that we were going to be able to do. And so now we're kind of having to rebrand Vision Zero or Target Zero. At the national level, this is being called the Safe Systems Approach. But it's really the same approach, which is - if you're going to have crashes, they should be less severe. You should be able to design your roads so that you don't get hurt.

[00:05:21] Crystal Fincher: So this is an interesting one, in sometimes - just in the general discourse online and in conversations, hear people say - You know, you're never going to get rid of all crashes. Is this even a realistic goal to have? Is this a realistic goal to have? Have there been areas, cities, countries who have significantly reduced the amount of injuries and violence due to traffic?

[00:05:49] Ryan Packer: Yeah, there have been places. Like I mentioned, Scandinavia - so both Helsinki and Oslo have gone entire years without seeing any fatalities. The city of Hoboken, New Jersey is being touted as sort of our North American example. It's a pretty small city, but it's a good case study in terms of being able to look at the design features - they've done a lot of work around making intersections safer. And so the outcome is achievable. And the question isn't really quibbling over getting to a literal zero. But when we have 810 fatalities in a state, another additional couple thousand people every year seriously injured - it's not really a question of is it achievable, but there's a lot of stuff we could be doing to actually dramatically decrease that. And if we start to do that, we can start to argue about what it actually looks like to be zero, but I don't think we're anywhere near even close to that conversation.

[00:06:41] Crystal Fincher: We really aren't. And you have actually helped make the problem more visible to me just in how you cover this issue. And being online on social media, you post many of the pedestrian and bike involved collisions in the city of Seattle, some surrounding areas. And my goodness, it is so frequent all over the city, but certainly concentrated - unfortunately, too frequently - in some particularly troubling spots in the city. Where do we stand now in terms of the levels of traffic collisions, injuries, fatalities? We've seen a spike, but are we at an all-time high? And what is causing this?

[00:07:30] Ryan Packer: It's not quite at all-time high. In the 40s, Seattle had a pedestrian traffic death counter downtown that was basically tallying up the fatalities during the first couple decades of the automobile. So thankfully, we're not at that point anymore. But in terms of a reasonable level, we're at levels that we haven't seen since the 1980s. But the types of crashes are different - obviously, pedestrians and cyclists are just a much huger proportion of people who are getting killed and seriously injured on the roads. And so it's a full-on resurgence.

[00:08:01] Crystal Fincher: A full-on resurgence and also - I don't know comparison-wise in terms of frequency, but my goodness, there are a lot of cars going into buildings these days. Is that more frequent? Do we know? Is it something that anyone is looking at? And what seems to be the cause of those collisions, those crashes?

[00:08:19] Ryan Packer: I think it's still the same root causes that you see cars hitting other people driving and people walking. It's just the design of roads - a lot of areas don't really have that sort of recovery zone - you have buildings right up against a street. Not necessarily arguing in favor of having a huge recovery zone in our city, but in terms of there's just not a lot of margin for error when you have a street that's designed for moving significant amount of cars at speeds. And so if you have a street that's designed to move a couple thousand cars per hour during rush hour - overnight, early morning hours, when you have fewer cars, then that leads to people being able to get to higher speeds. And so ultimately, it's just a question of how we prioritize designing the street.

[00:09:04] Crystal Fincher: So how does our current approach to transportation planning and road design enable our current situation?

[00:09:13] Ryan Packer: So a vast majority of our fatalities and serious injuries happen on these wide, multi-lane arterial streets where you have maybe a 25 or 30 mile per hour speed limit, but average speeds are closer to 30, 35, 40 [mph] . And so a lot of these roads are state highways - not separated state highways like I-5 or SR-167, but actual main street that goes through a small town or a suburban city in Washington. We talked about the prevalence of fatal crashes in South King County - this is like Kent, where there's a lot of surface highways - Pac Highway and 99 and Kent-Kangley and all those streets. That particularly Pierce County as well has a astronomical rate of traffic deaths compared to a similarly sized county like Snohomish. And so these are all very similarly designed - they're designed to move large numbers of people and then they also have a lot of infrequent crossings. So if you have a bus line that's running up and down a state highway, but you have only crosswalks every third of a mile or quarter of a mile - if someone is trying to catch their bus and it might come every 20 minutes or 30 minutes or 50 minutes, then they're going to take that risk and say, I need to cross here because I'm going to miss my bus and can't get to work. And so the design of these streets is clearly a central key issue. And the political consensus hasn't been to take these as a priority - we've obviously spent a lot of money expanding the state highway network at a state level. But that is starting to slowly change.

[00:10:48] Crystal Fincher: I want to talk about that in just a moment. But I also want to talk about - what is our current approach to the prioritization of cars versus people walking, or on bikes, or rolling? And how does that impact the way the roads are designed?

[00:11:04] Ryan Packer: So a lot of our cities are designed around a metric called Level of Service. And a Level of Service is you basically go out and you measure how fast, how quickly cars are able to get through an intersection. And if they have to wait a certain number of seconds, then you get a grade - and it's A, B, C, D, E, or F. And so those grades actually dictate a lot of how our cities are designed. And it's pretty wild in terms of kind of reverse engineering the outcomes that we definitely don't want - in terms of having high speeds on our roads, having a lot of traffic, basically enabling more people to drive because it's easier to get around by that mode as opposed to the other modes where we're not prioritizing. For example, I would say it's an extreme example in terms of how this works - Sound Transit is working on extending light rail to Federal Way right now. And part of the environmental review of that entire process is actually identifying areas where people, when they're going to drive to a light rail station - like in Star Lake - they've identified what the Level of Service at that intersection is going to be. And as part of the environmental review, they have to actually expand the roadway. They have to expand the roadway to build a light rail station. I cannot make that up.

[00:12:27] Crystal Fincher: Well, this seems really challenging, especially if we're just focusing on car throughput and speed as the metric - especially since car speed is directly related to the types and severities of injuries for pedestrians and bicycles. Do we basically have a system that says we need to get cars through as fast as possible, everyone else is just at the mercy of that?

[00:12:52] Ryan Packer: Yeah. And we have a culture that is actually kind of tacitly endorsing speeding. There was a survey conducted by the Traffic Safety Commission around driver behavior and 40% of people openly admitted that they speed frequently or regularly. That's 40% just saying that, not even wanting to lie on a survey. And so there was a school zone survey of actual drivers conducted over the past two years that basically counted like 10,000 drivers during the active school hours when you're supposed to be driving 20 miles per hour outside of a school. And they found that 70% of drivers were not obeying that, including - and this is wild - half of the school bus drivers.

[00:13:35] Crystal Fincher: Whoa, I wasn't expecting that one. So we have this system where we basically prioritize drivers. How does this manifest when it comes to conversations we have about state investments in transportation, the Transportation Package, the Seattle Transportation Levy - lots of things we hear about in the news. How does this relate to the type of road design and investment that we're seeing?

[00:14:03] Ryan Packer: So investments to improve biking and pedestrian infrastructure have always kind of been a little bit of a side dish to the main interests of expanding roads to reduce traffic, speed up port operations, create new routes for freight - those sorts of things - mainly because pedestrian and bike projects are not as expensive on a per project basis. So you're able to tout a lot of different individual projects when they don't actually add up to the same as creating a new Highway 509. But the system actually works best when it's on autopilot. And so Seattle's had a Complete Streets ordinance for almost 10, 20 years now, which basically says that every time you go out and you are doing maintenance, you're going to repave a street. You have to actually look at - Okay, well, do we have a really good bike lane? Do we have transit prioritization here? Do we have full pedestrian facilities? It doesn't always work, and so it's kind of piecemeal. It also often depends on the advocacy in that area, which is incredibly inequitable. If you have a road going through a wealthy area, people have more free time to be able to spend on actually advocating for their community. For example, we just had a repaving project up in northwest Seattle on 15th Avenue Northwest through Ballard - a lot of people probably know that road, it's pretty unpleasant to walk on. They were just going to repave it going north from the Ballard Bridge. And we basically had to say - Hey, wait a minute, we have a Complete Streets ordinance. What are you actually going to do to make this safer? And they had to backpedal, which illustrates the piecemeal approach that should be on autopilot - we shouldn't have to actually advocate for basic infrastructure on every single project level, but it's not there yet.

[00:15:50] Crystal Fincher: Definitely not there yet. I will say - in the city of Los Angeles, there was last year a big initiative passed by the residents of that city that basically mandated a Complete Streets plan, where they were in a situation similar to ours, where - Okay, it's in the plan, but in practice, it's kind of aspirational, it doesn't always happen. And there seems to be a lot of flexibility and judgment that can be applied to that that results in Complete Streets not getting built when they're doing work on a road. They decided to mandate that and take that flexibility out of it and said - We said we wanted Complete Streets and now it's a mandate that it's going to happen anytime you're doing a quarter mile's worth of paving or better. Would love to see something like that here. But as we move forward here, what kinds of improvements to the road and the streets are useful? The first thing I'm looking at is the amount of roads that don't have sidewalks for people to even walk on. What are we talking about there and what kinds of improvements are we looking at when we talk about improving streets for everyone?

[00:17:04] Ryan Packer: Obviously, the basic pedestrian and bike infrastructure is huge. Number one, it allows increased mobility. You have fewer conflicts - so getting actual road users separated - if you have people walking in a road, that's an inherent conflict. And so basically ensuring a lack of conflict is number one. But the benefit of that is often when you're adding bike infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure - you are looking at the rest of the road saying, How much of the space can we spare? How much can we actually reduce the lanes, maybe take one away? And that actually has a positive effect as well - larger lanes tend to lead to more speeding and more dangerous interactions. And so this is actually the really positive trend that we're seeing in Washington. You mentioned that LA measure. In 2022, with our last statewide transportation package, the Move Ahead Washington package, the Legislature actually included a Complete Streets mandate for state highways, which was a huge - I think I called it a quantum leap in our piece on The Urbanist on this. Basically, a huge sea change in terms of how we see our state highway infrastructure. Basically saying that every time we're going out on a project over a half a million dollars, we have to look at whether we are actually implementing this bike infrastructure. We have 1,100 miles of state highways that run through population centers - a huge proportion of those state highways are missing pedestrian infrastructure, and almost all of them are missing bike infrastructure. So basically, it's a huge opportunity that hasn't fully been realized yet because we haven't actually fully invested in actually doing that maintenance. And so we're still underfunding our highway maintenance by around a billion dollars a year. And so it's kind of a weird position for me - to be a multimodal advocate asking for more highway maintenance dollars, but this is why - because obviously we should maintain what we have before we expand. But while we're doing that at the same time, we're actually modernizing, bringing up to standard the actual infrastructure that we need in our communities.

[00:19:08] Crystal Fincher: It's a very good point. Now, there are some people who say that bike and pedestrian infrastructure is all well and good, but that's really expensive. And we need to focus on the basics of just taking care of our roads because that's what's in the budget and not the extra money that it takes and the really expensive improvements of bike and pedestrian facilities. Is that a valid concern?

[00:19:33] Ryan Packer: Well, no, in terms of a direct answer. But I think the conversation has changed. I think people actually do consider bike and pedestrian infrastructure to be the basics. I think people understand the benefits, at this point, that come from investing in these things. I think people get frustrated when a bike lane costs $10 million - I think that's a legitimate concern because the question is whether we're utilizing a good use of our funds. What they don't really tell you is that that $10 million bike lane probably involved a water main replacement that was 100 years old and we needed to do it. And there's really no reason for that to actually be called a bike lane cost. And so, in some ways, it's how this is actually portrayed, I think, generally. And so the basics of particularly a large city's transportation system, but also a smaller community that's built around transit or walking and biking - I think people understand that the basics is actually making sure that people can get around by any mode that they want to and safely. Safely, I think, is a huge point. That's actually one of the encouraging things about that statewide traffic safety survey I mentioned. Apart from the fact that 40% of people say that they speed all the time, people in that survey admitted that they think we can get to zero and that they think that they want their own communities and places that they visit to be safer.

[00:20:56] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely - that's very encouraging. So when it comes to getting closer to zero, what are the kinds of strategies and changes that have been proven to be effective?

[00:21:10] Ryan Packer: Basically, the model is right-sizing our roadway infrastructure so that it's not so oversized and actually fits the needs of our communities. And so having a highway with five or six lanes across, just for one hour or two hours a day of making sure that we're probably not even at a Level of Service A - more like a B or C - but basically having that oversized infrastructure in place has just been proven to lead to negative safety outcomes. And so the city of Seattle, I think, is a bit of a leader on this in terms of being able to prove that its measures are effective. The question is whether the politics actually allows those measures to be repeated. So in the Rainier Valley of Seattle, Rainier Avenue has long been one of the most dangerous streets in the region. But about 10 years ago, we took a section through the heart of the Columbia City Business District and we put it down to one lane in each direction from two, with a center turn lane - and that brought the number of collisions down, brought average speeds down, it brought people seriously injured and killed down. But we didn't go ahead and say - Okay, we learned from that. What instead happened - we got a new mayor, and that mayor wasn't interested in going ahead and saying, Oh okay, we're going to bring this south, we're going to bring this north. But no. And so ultimately, the question is the politics.

[00:22:38] Crystal Fincher: Well, and that's a significant question. So how do we make this shift politically?

[00:22:44] Ryan Packer: For one, I think doing these things, like I said, putting the system on autopilot a little bit - having the conversation required and actually having good standards. One thing that is coming out of this Complete Streets mandate is an actual standard for what a bike lane on a state highway looks like. It could be a couple of different things - it's not always a cookie cutter approach, but it has to meet a basic threshold. And ultimately, requiring communities to have to fight for every individual project just to get on the agenda is going to keep the conversation wholly in the realm of the political in terms of who has power in communities. And so if these Complete Streets policies actually ensure that everyone gets a seat at the table, I think are going to be a lot more equitable and actually be able to move us forward in a meaningful level, not on this sort of piecemeal basis.

[00:23:33] Crystal Fincher: What role does enforcement play in keeping streets safe and making them safer for everyone?

[00:23:42] Ryan Packer: So I think that you'll get a lot of different answers around the role of enforcement. The traditional traffic safety personnel at the state level, particularly in Washington, definitely still see a continued role for police enforcement - State Patrol to be able to enforce traffic laws - whereas others will point to the inherent inequities that come from having a personnel-based police-based response to ensuring that people are obeying traffic laws. And so I think the old way of doing things maybe pre-pandemic but before all these continual staffing issues at the local police departments and the State Patrol has been just adding traffic enforcement as a little side job to local departments to be able to get some overtime and do that in their off hours. And now they're finding that they don't really have the resources to do that - and that's coming to a head against a federal and state traffic safety apparatus that was kind of always counting on that to happen. People get frustrated when they see these education campaigns that are geared at telling you to slow down and behave - and question the efficacy of that. But actually enforcement, so like giving police grants for running DUI checkpoints and doing speed traps, and also education campaigns - those are the two main ways that the federal government has long provided funding for traffic safety at an actual statutory level. They literally can't use the money for any other way. And so we're at this point where we have to question the things we've been doing that actually got us into this.

And so obviously there's also other types of enforcement - there's camera enforcement, but it's also politically fraught in terms of - those 40% of people I mentioned who say they speed all the time, they don't see themselves as the problem. So if they're getting speeding tickets, then that's sort of the politically dicey reason why camera enforcement hasn't really taken a huge toehold. But that is changing a little bit - we have some new state laws that are trying to empower local governments to actually use those tools. But it remains to be seen if they're actually going to fully embrace that. And since it's not, as I mentioned, something that's on autopilot, it is going to rely on individual actors making individual choices about where to add cameras. And so I'm not sure quite how effective that's going to be.

[00:25:58] Crystal Fincher: Certainly, even with the camera conversation, where those are deployed, there's a history of deploying surveillance - it's a type of surveillance devices - in traditionally BIPOC communities more than others. So that is a consideration that needs to be worked through by people. Is there any data on the permanence of enforcement and how that impacts behavior, whether it's sometimes - you hear about emphasis patrols for people talking on phones. Or emphasis patrols for - we've had them in South King County and the city of Kent - to try and prevent jaywalking type things. Those where it's a temporary or even kind of on the freeway with the threat of getting speeding tickets versus fixed permanent enforcement like traffic safety cameras - is there any data comparison about the impact of the change of behavior between the two?

[00:26:58] Ryan Packer: So one-off, high visibility enforcement where police will say - Hey, we're going to be enforcing X law on this road at this time. There's some data about very short-term gain around changes, but it's very limited - and so you have to continually do that. Like I said, we have this infrastructure in this country where we provide these grants on a local level to local law enforcement - and it's just a continual stream and it doesn't really ever go away. And so it's just kind of just taken as an assumption that they're going to have to keep going out there and doing the same things over and over and over again to keep people from breaking traffic laws. But first of all, we see the data that this is not actually really stemming the tide. And as opposed to a permanent camera that actually is able to see at all times, they're not really even on the same level.

[00:27:49] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. So when we talk about enforcement, we talk about cameras - those are becoming a little bit more frequent. And like you said, there were recent changes in state law to help continue the expansion of those in some areas. When it comes to design interventions, there are things that we can do on roadways, there's also things that we can do in cars. What are those things?

[00:28:17] Ryan Packer: So obviously, one of the biggest things that we could be doing that's in the realm of the possible, if not necessarily the practical at this point, is to head back towards smaller vehicles. The arms race for larger SUVs with more pointed hoods that really - unfortunately, to be direct about it - drag someone underneath the vehicle when they are hit, as opposed to going up and over or onto the side is a systemic issue that's becoming very clearly recognized as a big contributor to particularly the pedestrian safety crisis that we have nationally. And so, anything we can do to stem that tide - it seems like a very tall order, especially on a state level. Some people, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board in particular, have been trying to push the envelope on this.

Another thing we could be doing, though, is looking at how to limit speeds in certain situations. Some cities are taking the lead and trying to lead with their own fleets - the city-owned vehicles - basically preventing those from being able to go over the speed limit. Or maybe require the driver to say - All right, I'm going over the speed limit - and have that send back a little ping to their boss, basically saying - Hey, why did you exceed the speed limit here? One thing that that could do is create a example. And especially if you're on a two-lane road and you're behind a county vehicle that can't speed, you can't speed either. So a little bit of a kind of an infrastructure change, but we've also seen a lot of reluctance on the county level. This has been promoted by Councilmember Claudia Balducci, but the idea's run into a little bit of resistance because county officials are going all-in on electrifying their vehicles. And they're concerned about adding another factor that might actually hinder the transition to the zero emission - so it's conflicting with other goals and values.

[00:30:05] Crystal Fincher: But even beyond the county in general, there is speed-limiting technology that is available that we make a choice not to use or to apply, or even notifications on modern cars that are available that we make a choice not to use or apply. But the application of those could reduce the amount of traffic fatalities and casualties on our roads.

[00:30:29] Ryan Packer: Sure, anyone who's ridden a scooter in Seattle knows that the technology exists for you to not exceed a certain speed and to not go in certain areas - and to kind of reconcile the two. And so I think it's absurd that we have this technology already in all of our deployed scooters, but the idea of having it in our much larger SUVs that have the potential to hurt a lot of people is currently a little bit still a fringe idea.

[00:30:57] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. So when it comes to what's next and how we improve things, what are we looking at from a city, county, and state perspective that can make a difference here?

[00:31:11] Ryan Packer: I think the most helpful thing that I see is these Complete Streets mandates continuing to get strengthened and actually understanding that adding bike and pedestrian infrastructure and taking away space from oversized roads is one of the biggest things we can do to make gains. But I continue to be concerned about inequitable application of that in terms of - especially in King County, where a lot of the traffic fatalities are happening outside Seattle in jurisdictions that might not have as complete stringent Complete Streets ordinance as Seattle does. And so ensuring that even if it's not a state highway, that there's actually some level of minimum standard to make sure that that gets put in place. But I think the hopeful thing is actually just a recognition that we're able to do this by taking away space. And actually, I think "road diet" was a politically hated term, maybe 10, 15 years ago. But you do see cities like Kent and Federal Way, and those cities actually just - Oh, we're doing a road diet here. It's kind of standard practice, you know, let us know your feedback, but this is what we're going to do. So it's a little bit of a gain in terms of progress being made, but ultimately - I was listening to a call of a virtual meeting with both the Chief Safety Officer at WSDOT and - the state Department of Transportation - and the head of the Traffic Safety Commission. And they were both in agreement that basically design of roadways is the only long-term solution to actually getting closer to the zero.

[00:32:42] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. So for people who are listening and wondering how they can better advocate for safer streets, what can they do?

[00:32:54] Ryan Packer: The best thing for you to do is to get involved with your local advocacy community. In Seattle, that's Seattle Neighborhood Greenways or Cascade Bicycle Club. Basically, these organizations that are pushing on a more holistic level for these sweeping changes that are going to have the best benefit, and pushing governments away from implementing the recommendations of 24 years ago in our Target Zero 2000 plan. It's just right there - challenging cities to plan and design for pedestrians and not just fast movement of motor vehicles. It just takes continued push, and I think that the progress is being made.

[00:33:29] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And so this brings us to the issue of our new Transportation Levy. So just starting out, what is a transportation levy and why do we have one?

[00:33:42] Ryan Packer: So Seattle's had a transportation levy for about 20 years - This is going to be our third major transportation levy if it ends up passing this year. The current levy, which was approved in 2015, is about to expire - that levy was a pretty ambitious levy. It had actually tripled the size of the previous one, which had originally just been intended to bridge the gap between our maintenance needs and our maintenance funding - that was why it was called Bridging the Gap. And then went to the levy to Move Seattle in 2015 to have an ambitious plan to upgrade and modernize, do a lot of really exciting things with the transportation system. A couple years in, it looked like things were maybe too ambitious for it. But the important thing about a transportation levy is while it includes money, it also sets the table of what you're committing to and basically frames the entire conversation around transportation investments in the city for close to a decade, which is why it's a huge event when we have to figure out what the next one is.

[00:34:45] Crystal Fincher: So a lot of people, when they think about transportation, they think of it as a basic function of government - to take care of the roads, make sure that everything is on track there, give people safe, reliable ways to get around, whether that's sidewalks or bike lanes or whatever. Why is this not included in the sum of taxes and fees that people and companies pay? Why is this an additional levy or an additional assessment to fund this stuff?

[00:35:17] Ryan Packer: Basically, we have a 1% every year cap in Washington state on total amount of property tax revenue the city can collect as part of the general fund. And so, especially during recent years when the rate of inflation is way higher than 1%, that means the buying power of the city is effectively going down. Since we've had that property tax cap, it's kind of moved into the era of having levies for a lot of different things - EMS on the county level, transportation, housing, parks. And Seattle's been doing that for transportation, like I said, for about 20 years - so a little workaround. But if there wasn't a cap, the City Council could every year just say - We're going to do this next year. So it kind of adds that level of accountability and sets the expectations for a longer period of time.

[00:36:05] Crystal Fincher: So with the last levy, I think it is fair to characterize it as structured in a way to meaningfully address the climate challenges that had become clear when that was passed and that being a major element of what was there. Also recognizing that we have a multimodal city, that there are lots of people who already don't drive, and that making a city that doesn't require a car to navigate makes it more attractive and welcoming. And I think we've seen that come to pass. Also heard your feedback on it being overambitious. So what did the city learn from that and take from that? And how did that influence the way this levy took shape?

[00:36:48] Ryan Packer: So I think it's definitely a response to the fact that Move Seattle was a little too ambitious. I think the reaction at City Hall was - We're going to be a little bit less ambitious here, we're going to kind of rest on the laurels of the achievements that were made during Move Seattle and coast a little bit. The mayor likes to frame this as a levy that is an all-the-above strategy. It's not really heavily investing in a lot of ambitious infrastructure. There's no pedestrian bridge at Northgate like Move Seattle had or overpass in SoDo for freight movement. There's no big signature projects like that. And so we're going to be a little bit more safe and moderate.

[00:37:26] Crystal Fincher: Moderate is an interesting word there because recent elections have certainly been influential in how this has taken place. We have a number of new councilmembers - principally the Chair of Seattle's Transportation Committee, Councilmember Rob Saka, who ran on much more of a get-back-to-basics approach on transportation. Let's focus on road maintenance. Certainly, I've heard a number of people talk about bridge maintenance, which is very important - those things are necessary. But a lot of people feel that also expanding and maintaining transit, making it easier and safer to get through the city no matter what form of transit you take also demands that kind of investment and commitment from the city. And the councilmembers that were elected had a different opinion. So how have they steered and influenced how this levy was composed?

[00:38:23] Ryan Packer: The big thing I took away from the whole deliberative process at the Council where they tweaked this levy is that they left a lot of things in place. And so while they were basically doing exactly what you said - touting the delivering the basics approach - they left a lot of the things that they probably wouldn't consider basics. For example, $66.5 million on People Streets and Public Spaces, which could be really revolutionary in terms of creating really vibrant neighborhoods in Seattle in terms of outdoor streetscapes that are inviting. But I doubt that a transportation levy developed by Councilmember Rob Saka would actually have that in there. They left $133 million for bike lanes intact. They left the Vision Zero funding at $160 million. And you said transit - so there's $151 million in there for transit that they largely didn't touch. And so I think part of that is they've been in office for seven months and didn't want to fully take the mayor's proposal to shreds. But it shows where we are at, which is there's actually a pretty big consensus that a sustainable transportation system does need to have these multimodal investments.

[00:39:37] Crystal Fincher: So what are the general areas that this transportation levy covers?

[00:39:41] Ryan Packer: So it really tries to target all areas of Seattle transportation system, but it is pretty highly focused on so-called basic maintenance. So around a third of the overall levy would be roads and bridge maintenance. But then you also have a big investment in sidewalks, pedestrian safety, transit, bike lanes, and like I said, People Streets and Public Spaces - some great improvements - and a small category for climate projects.

[00:40:10] Crystal Fincher: So, okay, about a third of the levy is with road maintenance, repaving projects. Is that pretty consistent with what we saw before? Is that a bigger chunk of the levy this time?

[00:40:22] Ryan Packer: The amount of road repaving is a ramp up from Move Seattle, which was itself a ramp up from the previous levy. And that's because we are not keeping up with basic road maintenance. In 2004, about half of the roads in Seattle were rated Fair condition or below. The last year, that number had gone up - despite two levies worth of spending - to 63%. So we are not keeping up with basic road maintenance, mainly because we have a lot of roads. We have 1,500 miles of arterial roads - not neighborhood streets, but just the actual main roads that people use most of the time - which is enough to drive from Seattle to Albuquerque.

[00:41:00] Crystal Fincher: When it comes to the transit improvements - are we seeing an expansion, a contraction from the last levy? And what types of transit projects are included in here?

[00:41:13] Ryan Packer: Move Seattle did include more money for transit. It also included a pretty radically different approach to investing in transit, saying we're going to upgrade seven corridors and make them fully Rapid Ride and prioritize these specific routes. It's 2024 - we've had one of those open, another one's opening in 40 days. Those projects were incredibly disruptive and really focused. And they were kind of politically challenging - shall we say - in terms of neighborhood businesses in Eastlake don't want that project, over on Leary Way there's some pushback. And so politically, there's going to be less of a hard road to hoe here because it's less corridor focused, it's going to spread the investments around. But we are promising 160 bus improvements as a result of this levy. Now, those could be bus stop upgrades - it's not clear exactly how effective those are going to be at speeding up buses. It also is really focused on Light Rail connections - we've got Judkins Park Station, 130th Street, the new infill stations at South Graham and Boeing Access Road that are supposed to open toward the end of the decade - really targeting those. But it's definitely not as transit intensive as Move Seattle was, mostly because both what we learned during that time, but also the county's, which would be a partner on our bus route upgrades, is also taking a step back.

[00:42:37] Crystal Fincher: When it comes to pedestrian-oriented improvements - top of which is sidewalks - what will this levy include beyond what the prior levies did?

[00:42:50] Ryan Packer: So let's just dig in on sidewalks as a subcategory here, which got a lot of discussion during the deliberations of the Council. So we have around 12,000 blocks of missing sidewalks in the city - about one out of every four blocks is missing a sidewalk. It's a huge gap to fill. And Move Seattle built 250 blocks in nine years. Now, a lot of those are really important, critical connections, and it's really valuable that we have them. But obviously that's still a long way to go. This levy proposes to basically double that - do the same amount of blocks, but in five years instead of nine. And so it is still ramping it up. The problem with building a lot of sidewalks is it's really hard - they take a lot of time to design and fit into a neighborhood. But they are too expensive to be delivered by the City's own crews, and so they have to be contracted out. But it's something you have to build everywhere in the city - it's not a very targeted project. And so it's caught in the middle of the types of projects that the City does.

[00:43:55] Crystal Fincher: When it comes to improvements for people on bikes, what can people look forward to in this levy?

[00:44:03] Ryan Packer: This is another area where this levy rests on the accomplishments of the one we're in right now, and it doesn't really promise a whole lot of huge bike corridor projects. It focuses on these critical connections - over I-5 or between neighborhood connections - that a lot of people have trouble with when they're trying to get around Seattle by bike, but it doesn't really promise huge corridor upgrades filling in a lot of the network. It actually leaves a lot of gaps still, which is a pretty big frustration. The reason for that is sort of political - I think it's an issue of wanting to avoid some of these big fights that we've had during Move Seattle. Obviously, we had a big one around 35th Avenue Northeast in Wedgewood, but also one in Beacon Hill. And so this levy also proposes to spend more time on the bike lanes we already built - giving them more substantive barriers. But that's a project that nobody objects to, and so it's very easy to implement it.

[00:45:01] Crystal Fincher: Now, we are currently behind on our 2030 climate goals. This levy is meant to take us through that. Does this include projects and programs that are going to get us on track?

[00:45:14] Ryan Packer: The answer to that is flatly no. It's not ambitious enough to do that. Based on what I just outlined in terms of the transit investments, the bike lane investments, even the sidewalk investments - it is too slow of a pace. And so we even have this climate category in the levy, which is largely focused on electric vehicles, but also planting trees, which is very important. But the biggest source of emissions in Seattle is our actual car emissions. And obviously, getting people out of their cars, making their trips shorter, and allowing them to get around the city more easily is the big thing that would actually move the needle. And it's pretty clear that it's going to take a lot more than this one levy.

[00:45:56] Crystal Fincher: Well, that is suboptimal, certainly. Is there anything else notable that's included in this levy?

[00:46:03] Ryan Packer: I think one noteworthy thing is we've never had a levy before that actually includes public space improvements - People Streets and Public Spaces. Seattle has shown a reluctance to actually be bold and do things like what Montreal is doing, like creating a pedestrian street network, or even cities like New York that have pedestrianized Broadway. We do have a funding source for that. It's not clear exactly what's going to happen with that money - if it's going to all go toward projects that are supported by the downtown business establishment - World Cup projects, Third Avenue upgrades. Or if we actually could do something like what Councilmember Tammy Morales has said, which is to create a pedestrianized plaza in every single neighborhood in the city. But I think the fact that we have a levy that is including this as one of its elements is a big deal.

[00:46:55] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, that sounds really positive. And overall, as you said, this levy doesn't include a lot of specific marquee projects, big new infrastructure to the degree that prior levies have. But it could be positive in some ways, could be negative in some ways - it depends. But there's a lot that puts money in a bucket without specifying exactly what's going to happen, so there's still a lot to be determined. And there's still a lot that potentially the community can influence, knowing that that money is there and allocated. Is that a fair assessment?

[00:47:27] Ryan Packer: Yeah, that's a big thing I would emphasize - is that this isn't a set-it-and-forget-it levy. A lot of people want there to be something that just kind of forces the city to just go on autopilot and build those projects. But they listen to community feedback. They respond. And we could have a entirely brand new City Council in six years to basically take this in a different direction. So that is something I would definitely remind people - is that your advocacy doesn't stop with the selection of the project categories in the levy. It actually starts with the passage of the levy.

[00:48:01] Crystal Fincher: That is very good to know. What has the reaction been from different stakeholders in the community to this levy?

[00:48:09] Ryan Packer: Well, there's a broad view on the urbanist community that it doesn't go far enough, which is not something I can really disagree with. Obviously, like we talked about, our climate goals really require much bigger investment in terms of pedestrian, bike, transit infrastructure. And then there's also been some concern on the more moderate side of the political spectrum in Seattle that this doesn't include enough accountability measures - although it's not really clear if that's true. It has pluses and has minuses in terms of locking in exactly what we need to happen over the next few years. So I think I see that as a positive. But the question is - is this a solid foundation for the next eight years of transportation investments in Seattle? And I think, looking at the categories as a whole and how much it invests in safety and infrastructure, I come out on the fact that it is a very solid foundation.

[00:49:04] Crystal Fincher: So this levy is going to be on the November ballot. What happens if voters decide not to pass the levy?

[00:49:14] Ryan Packer: Well, the current levy is about 30% of the budget of the Seattle Department of Transportation. Obviously, the City of Seattle is currently facing a budget deficit in the general fund, which is separate from transportation levy revenue. But if the next levy did not pass, there wouldn't be very much money to go searching under the couch cushions for to make up. So ultimately, there would definitely be a significant impact to the transportation services that we're delivering. I would say a substantial number of people who are currently employed at SDOT would have to be let go. But I don't think they would come back with a bigger levy next year - probably go back to the drawing board and scale back some of those things I talked about, like People Streets - I don't think that would end up in a second go-round on this. So ultimately, probably have a smaller, scaled-back levy. How fast that would be able to get on the ballot? February would probably be pretty optimistic. So April, maybe. And so there'd be a gap of service delivery.

[00:50:16] Crystal Fincher: Got it. So there is going to be a choice to be made. I think it's fair to say that most people expect this to pass - Seattle generally passes these transportation levies without much controversy or fanfare. Is that fair to say?

[00:50:34] Ryan Packer: Sure. Definitely the broad consensus is that Seattle never met a tax increase it doesn't like. Although I think people are smarter than that - they do actually understand the benefit and the cost analysis that goes into actually figuring out whether to support these things. I think you're going to see a broad consensus, especially among transportation advocates, that passing this is the best thing for Seattle's future.

[00:50:56] Crystal Fincher: Well, thank you so much for joining us today - helping us learn more about what we can do to help make our streets safer for everyone and helping us understand the Seattle Transportation Levy.

[00:51:10] Ryan Packer: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:51:12] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is produced by Shannon Cheng. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on every podcast service and app - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes.

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