With Big Levy Vote, Seattle Is Ready to Lead the Nation on Bike Infrastructure

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.

The last two years have revealed a very clear new superstar in the country's progress toward protected bike lane networks.

It's the Emerald City: Seattle.

In the last two years, Seattle has completed seven protected bike lane projects, more than any other city in the country in that period except New York.

Seattle heaved through a significant "bikelash" a few years ago, and it's discovered an ocean of political support on the other side.

On Tuesday night, the city's voters did something remarkable: By 56 percent to 44 percent, they approved a property tax increase that will spend $65 million on a 50-mile protected bike lane network and a 60-mile neighborhood greenway network over the next nine years. It'll also put $71 million toward Seattle's goal of eliminating serious and fatal crashes, $15 million to repair 225 blocks of damaged sidewalks, $250 million to maintain existing roads, and $140 million to maintain existing bridges.

The project list goes on. But it never stoops to the mistaken claim that a fast-growing city can fix its transportation problems by building more and more lanes for cars, always hoping that the next lane will be the one that never fills up.

Daily newspaper editorialized against the measure

A week ago, the conventional wisdom was looking bad for Move Seattle, as the program is called.

The Seattle Times blasted it in an editorial, saying that it'd be impossible to "ease the city’s intractable gridlock" without "big fixes" that would knock down parts of the city to make more room for cars. It was also, the Times said, too expensive.

"Move Seattle would cost the owner of a $450,000 house about $145 more a year," the Times shuddered.

A single major property owner, Faye Garneau, bankrolled the "no" campaign, personally donating $325,000 to the effort -- 96 percent of its funding and enough to outspend the "yes" campaign.

"That is more money that we've seen oppose a transportation measure ever in the city," Brock Howell, field director for the "yes" campaign, said in an interview Wednesday. "Coming in to last night, we were freaked out. We did not know where we were going to be on election night, and I think most of us were pretty damn pessimistic."

"I’m trying to do what’s right," Garneau told the Times. "I’m blessed that I have finances enough to do something about it."

Most of her fellow voters, it turned out, disagreed with her vision of what was right.

Changing public opinion one phone call at a time

Maybe the Times's call for "big fixes" reminded Seattle voters of the $80 million drill, the largest in the world, that's currently sitting beneath their downtown. The new freeway tunnel it's excavating was supposed to open this year; instead, it got stuck behind an eight-inch underground pipe and spent two years burning a hole in voters' pocket. The megaproject is currently 12 percent complete.

Maybe Seattle voters were put off by Garneau's involvement. On Tuesday's ballot, they also passed a measure to publicly finance local campaigns.

Or maybe Seattle just weighed the costs against the benefits and decided that it was worth spending a little money to live in a city where roads are safer and driving is optional.

Here's Times columnist Danny Westneat, a Move Seattle skeptic, on Wednesday:

For Howell and his colleagues, Tuesday's vote was the climax of four years of planning. They began with a round of focus groups and polling in 2011 and 2012 that identified appealing ways to talk about transportation, and organized five teams of volunteers around the city who were enthusiastic about projects in their areas.

On more than 1,000 total volunteer shifts, Move Seattle volunteers placed 81,000 calls to explain the measure in more detail than a radio ad or mailer.

"We knew we needed to win this thing through a lot of one-on-one conversations with voters through phone banks," Howell said. "Our margin of victory is going to be pretty close to the number of people we ID'd as supporters through all of our phone banking efforts."

'People shouldn't just die'

Tom Fucoloro, the publisher of Seattle Bike Blog and a vocal supporter of Move Seattle, wrote a moving article Wednesday that traced the history of Seattle's remarkable new direction back to a series of tragic deaths in 2011.

A fresh call for quick improvements

Seattle's struggle for better streets isn't over, of course. Advocacy group Seattle Neighborhood Greenways celebrated Tuesday's victory with a call for urgent action on Wednesday for the city to follow up on voters' mandate by building key parts of Move Seattle in the next year:

"Important as it is to maintain what we have, we passed a nearly billion dollar transportation levy because we’re ready to transform Seattle, not just to maintain it," the group wrote. "Seattle is playing host to the 'Olympics' of street engineers and activists next September when NACTO (National Association of City Transportation Officials) comes to town. Since NACTO centers around walking and biking tours of the best each city has to offer, it is a perfect opportunity to ramp up our visible, transformational infrastructure."

Here's their priority project list:

As we watch where Seattle goes from here, that final question will be at the top of our minds here at Green Lane Project HQ.

Our money's on "yes" for this one, too.

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