Tag: RapidRide

City Council, Transportation

Councilmember-Elect Saka Compared 8-Inch Road Divider to Trump’s Border Wall
Partial map of the RapidRide road safety improvement project on Delridge; the arrow points to the daycare Saka says the city is discriminating against.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember-elect Rob Saka, a former Meta attorney who will represent West Seattle’s District 1 starting next year, sent a series of increasingly heated emails to Seattle Department of Transportation employees during 2021 and 2022 seeking the removal of a road divider that SDOT installed in front of his kids’ preschool. The divider was part of the RapidRide H project connecting Burien, White Center, and West Seattle to downtown.

The curb-like divider is a variation on a common traffic calming device known as a hardened centerline. The curb, which replaced a double yellow line, physically prevents northbound drivers from making an illegal left turn to access homes and businesses on the west side of the street, including a bilingual preschool called the Refugee and Immigrant Family Center. According to an April 2022 South Seattle Emerald story about the dispute, Saka’s two children attended the preschool as of last year.

In the email thread (reproduced in part here), which PubliCola obtained through a records request, Saka compared the mid-block traffic barrier to Trump’s border wall and said it was “triggering” and “severely traumatizing” to immigrants who “have faced significant trauma during their perilous journeys, including by navigating divisive structures and barriers designed to exclude lives in the US.”

“First, it might be helpful to reset on physical barriers as a social construct and how SDOT’s dangerous barrier here has severely traumatized and upset our community at the Refugee & Immigrant Family Center (RIFC),” Saka wrote. “Historically, barriers have been used to exclude, isolate, divide, discriminate against, project power over, subjugate, render less than status to, punish, segregate, humiliate/embarrass, harass, degrade, and so much more.”

“Historically, barriers have been used to exclude, isolate, divide, discriminate against, project power over, subjugate, render less than status to, punish, segregate, humiliate/embarrass, harass, degrade, and so much more,” Saka told project staff last March. “More recently, the Trump administration sought to build an enormous wall on the southern border with Mexico – presumably, to exclude certain individuals deemed ‘undesirable’ in the name of national security.”

The border wall is a 30-foot-high barrier, spanning hundreds of miles, that has contributed to the deaths of countless migrants, including a growing number of deaths and injuries due to falls. The Delridge barrier is an 8-inch-high road divider that runs for about 100 feet. Although Saka described the divider as “highly unique and bizarre,” SDOT has installed similar road treatments across the city, including along 15th Ave. NW in Ballard and Rainier Ave. South between I-90 and the Rainier Valley.

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Even before SDOT installed the divider, left turns were illegal along the length of the RapidRide project, which also includes new bike lanes on both sides of the street. The divider is one of many new road treatments designed to keep people from attempting to pass stopped buses and prevent collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.

Many of the new safety measures along Delridge are much larger and more permanent than the raised centerline outside the RIFC. Just to the north of the preschool, for example, a new RapidRide bus stop in front of Louisa Boren K-8 school features a raised concrete island in the middle of Delridge, along with wide markings between the lanes to indicate that drivers should not turn left or pass buses at the RapidRide stop. Immediately to the north, a broad, landscaped median protects patrons at the Delridge library from cars turning illegally into the bike lanes and parking lot.

Nationwide, about a quarter of all car crashes involving pedestrians are caused by a driver turning left and hitting someone in their path.

The South Seattle Emerald’s story about the preschool’s concerns also notes that the new bike lane took out several parking spaces parents had used to drop off and pick up their kids.

POV: Driving north on Delridge Way SW, the new barrier blocks drivers from turning into a new bike lane and the sidewalk used by transit riders. It also prevents illegal left turns into a preschool parking lot.

In his emails, Saka suggested that community members, not roadway designers at SDOT, were in the best position to know what keeps their roadways safe.

“For clarity, we don’t need a secretive ‘design team’ to impose their errant decisions on us in the name of ‘public safety’. Nor do we need a benevolent king to do the same,” Saka wrote. (Emphasis in original.) “SDOT must immediately remove the most egregious feature – a concrete barrier that directly targets our RIFC community and was erected without our prior consultation, input, or knowledge.”

In April 2022, an SDOT public engagement manager offered to set up a meeting with Saka to discuss the project. Saka responded that he would only meet the SDOT team if the agency guaranteed in advance that they would remove the barrier. “Like I mentioned earlier, we need this pretty simple confirmation from SDOT in order to ensure any meeting would be an effective and efficient use of time,” Saka wrote. “I strongly urge you to NOT overthink your response.”

SDOT has not yet responded to PubliCola’s inquiries about the project, and Saka did not respond to detailed questions sent on Tuesday. The operator of the RIFC also did not immediately respond to questions sent Thursday. A search of court records did not show any legal action by Saka, either on his own or on behalf of the preschool, and the road divider remains in place.

Addiction, Drugs, Morning Crank, public safety, Transit, Transportation

Morning Crank: A “Bike Lane” Gone Wild

 

SDOT’s revised bus mobility estimates, which dial back sharply on RapidRide promises

1. On Thursday night, the Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee got a few new details about the “reset” the Seattle Department of Transportation is proposing for the $930 million Move Seattle levy, which will fail to meet most of its goals for pedestrian, bike, and transit projects due to cost overruns and a lack of anticipated federal funding.

I first wrote about the “reset” in early April, when I reported that “The ‘reset’ will likely mean significant cuts to some of the projects that were promised in the levy, particularly those that assumed high levels of federal funding, such as seven proposed new RapidRide lines, which were supposed to get more than half their funding ($218 million) from the feds. “They’re calling it a ‘reset,’ but I don’t know what that means,” says city council transportation committee chairman Mike O’Brien.  “It’s not terribly encouraging.” Additionally, O’Brien says, “costs have gone up significantly in the last few years because of the pace of the economy,” making capital projects, in particular, more expensive than the city bargained for.

The Seattle Times covered the story a few weeks later, noting that when SDOT presented its initial report on the shortfall to the levy oversight committee, the agency “gave no actual numbers or estimates of the size of the funding shortfall.” The city was counting on about $564 million in federal funds to leverage the $930 million in local tax dollars in the levy, but much of that funding has since fallen through or remains in doubt.

The report presented last night gives a better, though still incomplete, sense of what the likely shortfall will look like, and how the city is proposing to scale back the projects it promised. It also, importantly, represents a point of view about both what type of projects are important and what the city assumes about the future. The “reset” plan, if implemented, will undoubtedly make life easier for SDOT. But there will be a cost in lost goodwill among the communities that eagerly campaigned for, and voted for, Move Seattle, including bike and pedestrian advocacy groups that have already been burned by a department willing to (mis)characterize a curb-to-curb street rebuild on Second Avenue as a “bike lane” gone wild.

Under the revised Move Seattle plan, pedestrian, and bus priority-related projects will take the biggest hits, while repaving of arterial streets to enhance the physical travel experience of “all people in cars, trucks, and buses” will see the least dramatic cuts. That’s also a choice. SDOT could have invested more heavily in mobility projects for non-vehicular users (or bus riders, for that matter) or chosen not to require the bike mobility program, for example, to pay for non-bike-related improvements such as new traffic signals for cars. (Seriously, read Tom Fucoloro’s report on this, which breaks down the reasons “$12 million for a bike lane” is a canard).

Some highlights from the new report:

• Protected bike lanes and greenways—the gold standard for bike lanes, because they separate riders from cars and make it easier for people at a ride variety of skill levels to bike safely—are more expensive (between $650,000 and $2 million a mile) than simply painting a stripe on the ground. With an estimated shortfall of $36 million, SDOT is recommending that many proposed PBLs and greenways be replaced “using lower-cost design treatments (i.e. paint striping and posts in lieu of concrete curbs) to deliver the maximum amount of bicycle network connectivity.”

• Sidewalk construction, as David Gutman of the Seattle Times has reported, will be scaled back. Specifically, according to yesterday’s update, the city thinks it will have to build the 250 blocks of new sidewalks it promised in 2015 through a combination of traditional concrete sidewalks with curb ramps and “low-cost sidewalks” that use materials such as stamped  concrete and asphalt to cut down on the cost of materials.

• The seven new RapidRide corridors promised in the original Move Seattle plan are, as expected, unlikely to happen, thanks to a funding shortfall SDOT now estimates at $130 million. Instead of making the capital improvements that would be required to extend RapidRide to Southeast Seattle, Delridge, and the Central District, the city may instead make small improvements such as consolidating (eliminating) bus stops, dedicating some existing lanes to buses, and “upgrades to bus stops, boarding platforms and pedestrian crossing features.”

• The city believes it will still be able to meet its original goal of repaving up to 180 lane-miles on arterial streets—a $235 million line item in the original $930 million levy—by “deferring higher-cost reconstruction projects” and repaving some new streets with asphalt, rather than more-expensive (and longer-lasting) concrete.

2. Back in April, the Seattle Public Library system decided to install sharps containers in the restrooms at several branches in response to an uptick in improper needle disposal by injection drug users. The decision represented a 180-degree reversal in policy for the library. Back in March, after a custodial workers was jabbed by a needle while changing the trash in the women’s restroom at the Ballard branch, library spokeswoman Andra Addison told me that installing sharps disposal containers would be tantamount to condoning illegal drug use. Drug users, Addison added, might pull the containers off the wall and break into them to get at the needles inside, causing “a big mess.”

Earlier this month, the library sent out an update on how the pilot program is performing. (I obtained the report through a public records request). The report covers four weeks between April 6 and May 4. During those weeks, visitors to the Ballard, Capitol Hill, University, and Central library branch restrooms deposited 179 needles in the 14 sharps containers installed at those four locations—a number that is slightly skewed by a bag of 50 unused needles that was dropped in a container at the Capitol Hill branch.

Interestingly, given that Addison initially said that the library had considered installing sharps containers but decided that “we really just don’t have a need for” them, library staffers reported picking up improperly discarded used needles at branches across the system throughout the same period, including branches that did not get sharps containers. Systemwide, library workers picked up 112 improperly discarded needles during the pilot period, including a total of 50 between the Ballard, Capitol Hill, and University branches. There’s no control data to compare those collection numbers to, but it’s a fair assumption that if there were no sharps disposal containers at those four branches, that number would include the 179 needles that were left in the boxes, demonstrating not only that the Seattle Public Library does have a major problem with people discarding used needles on library property, but that the containers are working. Other branches where staffers found a significant number of needles lying around include Broadview (18), Fremont (11), and Greenwood (9).

Read the full update from the library here.

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