The following is an article published in The Seattle Times on October 21, 2024, about the transportation levy before voters in November.
Can $1.55 billion make Seattle streets safer?
By Nicholas Deshais
Fewer injuries have occurred following design work on this section of Rainier Avenue South and South Edmunds Street in Seattle. Lanes have been reduced from four to three, and the red bus-only lanes on the north side of the intersection and the plastic bollards prevent drivers from taking sharp left turns. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
Nine years have passed since the city of Seattle vowed to end all traffic deaths and major injuries on its nearly 4,000 miles of roads.
A lot’s changed since then — just not the number of people being killed by drivers.
In 2015, the year Seattle’s Vision Zero policy was adopted, 21 people died from crashes involving a motor vehicle on city streets and 143 people were seriously injured. That year, the Seattle Department of Transportation put out a public service announcement with some “tips” for drivers: Focus on the road, watch for pedestrians, don’t drink and drive. It had another spot for pedestrians, encouraging them to “be seen” by wearing bright or reflective clothing.
A year later, 25 people died on Seattle roads, and 167 were seriously hurt. Last year, the number of fatalities rose to 27, and those with major injuries reached 265.
Hope is on the ballot, supporters and advocates say of this year’s $1.55 billion transportation levy, which funds eight years of work and accounts for 30% of SDOT’s budget.
Transportation advocates from three groups, Aurora Reimagined Coalition, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Keep Seattle Moving, walk along Aurora Avenue North last week as they place and wave signs to promote a “yes” vote on Proposition 1. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
If approved, instead of relying on safety tips for drivers and pedestrians, the city will lean into ongoing work to remake the roads in a way that slows drivers, helps them watch out for people who aren’t in cars and, maybe, convinces them to leave the car at home and take the bus, walk or ride a bike.
Mail-in ballots went out to voters last week and must be postmarked or placed in election drop boxes by Nov. 5.
“It absolutely will make the streets safer,” Seattle Bike Blog’s Tom Fucoloro said of Proposition 1. His book about Seattle transportation history, “Biking Uphill in the Rain,” was a finalist this year for the Washington State Book Award.
“It would be an unprecedented investment in safety, even bigger than the [2015] Move Seattle levy, which itself was an unprecedented investment in safety,” said Fucoloro, who is part of a coalition supporting the levy that includes transportation, environmental, business and labor groups. “From my perspective, we couldn’t possibly put too much money into road safety.”
Gordon Padelford, executive director of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, left, and Tom Lang, with Aurora Reimagine Coalition, join other Seattle Proposition 1 advocates along Aurora Avenue North to promote a “yes” vote on the levy. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
There is no organized opposition, but former Seattle City Councilmember Alex Pedersen has been speaking out. “Unaffordable, inequitable and ineffective,” is his take.
The property tax levy would collect about $65 for every $100,000 in assessed value. That’s $530 a year for the owner of a median-valued home of $804,000 — $250 more than they’re paying now for the transportation levy that expires at year’s end, which was approved by 58% of voters in 2015.
The tax burden, Pedersen said, should be shared, through funding measures such as impact fees on developers.
How Seattle’s $1.5 billion transportation levy would be spent
The property tax measure would levy about $65 for every $100,000 of assessed property value. That means the owner of an $804,000 house would pay $530 a year, about $250 more than they’re paying now under the 2015 transportation levy.
Source: Seattle Department of Transportation (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
And, rather than spend money on little-used bikeways and other infrastructure that doesn’t ease traffic congestion or increase safety, Pedersen said the levy should fund more basic roadwork, such as seismic upgrades to bridges and the construction of more sidewalks. He said voters should reject Proposition 1 and force city leaders to craft a more reasonable proposal.
“It fails the safety test. It does not do nearly enough for safety and it ignores the data on safety,” said Pedersen, who chaired the council’s transportation committee during his four years in office. “The most traffic fatalities we see by far is pedestrians. But this levy allocates only 10% toward sidewalks.”
Overpasses crossing Interstate 5 through downtown Seattle show the many layers and kinds of traffic the city has to accommodate. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
Never done
The complexity of Seattle’s transportation system is on full display from the 40th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower.
Interstates join in a knot of lanes before cutting through the heart of the city. A grid of streets and sidewalks — and the near-constant flow of people, buses, cars and bikes they carry — blankets the city. In the distance, streetcars and the monorail move back and forth, and the light rail dives underground to meet its downtown stations. Ferries glide over Puget Sound.
“You’re never really done,” said Francisca Stefan, SDOT’s senior deputy director of capital projects, sitting in a conference room with the city moving below her. “You’re never done in terms of maintenance. You’re never done in terms of revision. Just when you think you might be done, something new like shared scooters shows up. And then we may have autonomous cars. And then you have you never know what.”
Seattle is prepared for that uncertain future, Stefan said, thanks to its 20-year transportation plan, passed unanimously by the City Council this year.
The 752-page plan envisions slower speeds, better and more frequent transit and more types of transportation on each road, even arterials. It underlines the importance of keeping the city’s streets in good condition.
One element the plan doesn’t have is funding. That’s where the levy comes in.
City officials can’t campaign for the levy, but they can detail what the levy would do. The list, while not as comprehensive as what was promised and not quite delivered under the 2015 levy, runs more than nine pages.
In short, the city says the levy will repave 15 arterials; upgrade and repair the Ballard, Fremont, Magnolia and University bridges; improve bus reliability; add 350 blocks of sidewalks; modernize traffic signals; better connect the city’s bike network; and ease the movement of freight.
The Ballard Bridge is among those on the levy’s repair and upgrade list. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
The biggest slice of the $1.55 billion is directed at street maintenance and modernization, at $403 million, with most going to repave arterial corridors, including segments of North 130th Street, Roosevelt Way Northeast, East Marginal Way South and Rainier Avenue South.
There’s money for bridges ($221 million), and freight ($45 million). And though there are a few buckets dedicated to safety — including $193 million for pedestrian safety and $133.5 million for bicycle safety — at the center of every one of the levy’s projects is safety, officials said.
“The mayor said to us very clearly, ‘Transportation safety is part of my public safety agenda,’ ” Stefan said. “Safety is woven throughout.”
It’s more than a buzzword, Stefan said. Every paving project or bridge repair will be run through a complete streets process, a city policy that says all roadwork should “provide appropriate accommodation” for all road users. The policy was developed as part of the $365 million Bridging the Gap levy approved by 53% of voters in 2006, and has been refined ever since.
Soon after being sworn in in September 2022, SDOT Director Greg Spotts called for a review of the program. That led the city to pivot to what’s called the Safe Systems Approach, which has been endorsed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and identifies lowering vehicle speeds as key to saving lives.
“We can’t control a person’s behavior, but we can influence it,” said Venu Nemani, SDOT’s chief safety officer.
Instead of appealing to drivers to drive more carefully, the city is now redesigning streets with “proven safety countermeasures.” They include pedestrian signals that let walkers begin crossing a street before the green light, curb bulbs that extend the sidewalk into the street, thus shortening the distance to walk and narrowing a vehicle lane, chicanes that make a road more serpentine and discourage speeding, speed humps and cushions, and lower speed limits.
An example of what this can look like, and what the levy promises, is Rainier Avenue South, Nemani said.
The bus at right is heading north on Rainier Avenue South in Seattle. Following design work there, at Rainier Avenue South and South Edmunds Street, fewer people have been seriously injured. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
Before the city began redesigning it in 2015, Rainier had four lanes of traffic and was known as the most dangerous street in Seattle. Drivers flew through the retail districts and neighborhoods of South Seattle on this former state highway at dangerous speeds, and stats piled up for every type of crash: head-on, rear-end and sideswipe. Drivers ran into pedestrians, bicyclists, buildings and parked cars.
The city credits redesigning Rainier with a reduction in serious injuries on the stretch between South Alaska and South Kenny streets. One fatal collision occurred on the redesigned road, and one happened there in the 10 years before the road was reworked.
The city cut the number of lanes and narrowed them, lowered speed limits from 30 mph to 25 mph, timed traffic signals to encourage slower speeds, and built bus-only lanes. What followed was a significant reduction in all collision types, a 30% decrease in crashes leading to injuries, a 40% reduction in bicycle and pedestrian crashes and far lower speeds.
Still, Fucoloro, with the bike blog, praised the work and said it showed a road can be designed to make people drive more responsibly.
A pedestrian crosses Rainier Avenue South at South Edmunds Street. Seattle officials say changes to road design have helped make the stretch safer. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
“Everyone’s had that experience of driving and seeing a speed limit sign, and it’s way slower than you’re going. That’s the street telling you to go faster,” he said. “We know so much more about road design and traffic safety now than when a lot of these roads were designed in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s not that that street has four lanes because it needs four lanes. It’s probably because no one has gone back and redesigned it since the ’60s.”
Nemani agreed, adding that Seattle’s focus on safety isn’t exactly the principle engineers like him had been taught or guided by for years, which focused on speed and moving as many cars as possible above all else.
Things have changed. “We care about all road users. We integrate safety into everything we do,” Nemani said.
Doubting zero
Andrew Dannenberg, an affiliate professor of urban planning and public health at the University of Washington, spent years in Atlanta working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he was one of six bike commuters on a campus of thousands of workers and researchers.
He credits Seattle with being “toward the forefront” of U.S. cities when it comes to road safety. He’s just not sure the city’s goal of stopping all road deaths will work as intended.
“I like the concept of Vision Zero, but the actual number I don’t believe. Something will still go wrong somewhere. I don’t think you’ll ever get to zero,” he said. “I don’t expect a perfect world. It will be an imperfect world. These investments will help design to ‘safer,’ but not zero.”
Looking at the number of deaths and major injuries on Seattle’s roads, it’s hard to disagree with him.
As Pedersen, the former council member, suggested, Seattle’s roads are most lethal for pedestrians. From 2016 to 2023, 108 pedestrians died after being hit by a car in Seattle. During the same time, 50 people who were either driving or riding in a car died as a result of a collision.
SDOT’s Stefan, however, said the numbers should be examined in context of not only state and national trends, but also a growing city.
According to the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, during the year Seattle adopted Vision Zero, the state tallied 551 deaths from crashes involving a motor vehicle in Washington. In 2023, 810 people were killed, a 33-year high and a nearly 50% increase from 2015.
Though deaths were down slightly nationally last year compared with the year before, they still amounted to 40,990 people dying on U.S. roads, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Like in Washington, however, that number is up from where it stood in 2015, when more than 35,000 people were killed.
So while the state and nation have seen an upward trend in road deaths, Seattle remains flat. Stefan said this flat trend is even more notable when considering the gain in Seattle’s population over the same period. In 2015, the city had just over 688,000 residents. That number grew to an estimated 755,000 in 2023, an increase of 67,000.
“Our denominator has changed,” Stefan said.
Nemani added that only New York City has fewer traffic deaths for every 100,000 people.
All of this points to the city’s strategy working, Stefan and Nemani said.
“The goal is zero for my family. The goal is zero for your family, and by extension it is for our community and our city,” Nemani said. “We have to get there. We need to do everything we can.”