Seattle City Council Sustainability & Transportation Committee 3/5/19

Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the Sustainability and Transportation Committee.

Today is Tuesday, March 5th.

It's 201 p.m.

My name is Michael O'Brien, chair of the committee, joined by my colleagues, Councilmembers Johnson and Sawant.

Thank you so much for being here.

Staffed today by both Suzy Levy and Jasmine Mwaha.

We have a few items on the agenda today, but we're going to start with public comment, as we always do.

Folks will have up to two minutes each.

I'll call your names.

You can come on forward.

Alex Zimmerman is going to be first, followed by Michael Taylor Judd, and then Ryan Packer.

anti-Semite and cretino.

My name is Alex Zimmerman.

I have very good news for you.

Yesterday, a stranger printed a very nice article about Seattle, for my understanding.

This is an article from the Atlantic, a different newspaper.

So Seattle, for my understanding right now, is number one.

fascist city in America, that's exactly what, as I told her, every day for 10 years, more than 2,200 times, stop Seattle fascism with idiotic face.

I give you classic example from transportation so you know about what I am talking.

This a small street.

what is good to courthouse, 300 feet.

So before like almost five, 10 car parking, everything, and I parking and disabled people parking.

Right now this idiot, a cretina, put six, six, I repeat word six.

Everybody who speak English understand?

Six commercial parking.

Totally cut us right for parking.

This six.

commercial parking for 300 feet in a civilized country, what I have experienced, in a European country, not Zimbabwe from Africa.

You understand what this means?

All commercial parking, postal delivery, commercial parking from 11 to 5 o'clock in the morning.

11 p.m.

to 5 o'clock.

This idiot did something that is very unique.

It's not surprise me, so we have right now in all America and also Seattle, not only fascist city, the city was built by freaking idiot.

It's exactly what has happened.

The transportation department, good, and cut parking for disabled parking by half next courthouse.

Makes the situation very complicated right now.

Very hard for disabled parking, final parking.

We have a privilege.

So right now I speak to everybody, to the 700,000 emerald degenerate idiot, clean this dirty chamber from idiot.

Thank you very much.

Can I apologize to the members of the audience who had to live through that, Councilman O'Brien, particularly to our younger members?

This is not what democracy looks like.

Thank you.

Michael.

Good afternoon council members.

My name is Michael Taylor Judd.

I'm here this afternoon offering comment as chair of the West Seattle Transportation Coalition, as well as former chair of the North Delridge Neighborhood Council, speaking in support of the resolution for the Delridge Multimodal Project.

Two key points I want to make.

You know, for a lot of the neighbors, this project cannot move forward fast enough, even though the current iteration of the project dates back to 2015. Conversations around these issues have been dating back several years before that, and it was originally just a paving and boulevard project.

So we have been involved for a long time in advocating for some of the things that are in this project.

And then additionally, we want to give a shout out to SDOT and the Department of Neighborhoods SDOT has done excellent public outreach around this into the neighborhood, sending postcards out, holding several in-person open houses, doing outreach in multiple languages into our neighborhood, as well as taking advantage of the possibility to, you'll hear in the next couple weeks actually about the North Delridge Action Plan update.

And SDOT really took advantage of that process while it was going on to participate in open houses with that.

That had literally on-site translation and utilizing the POELs from the Department of Neighborhoods to go out and do things directly where people are, in their language, and where they're used to sharing and communing with each other.

So we could not be more supportive of this project.

Thank you.

Thanks, Michael.

Ryan?

Ryan, you're going to be followed by Megan Murphy and then Robert Ketch.

Hi there.

I'm here to talk about the public health crisis happening on our streets right now.

The preliminary data in your presentation on Vision Zero shows that the past five years were basically indistinguishable from the five years before that with only a 3% reduction in the number of people who were killed or seriously injured.

by traffic in Seattle.

The stagnation is disappointing, but it's not terribly surprising given the lack of progress that our city has made, slowing crash prone materials, separating vulnerable users at intersections, and enforcing our existing traffic laws, like crosswalk compliance.

In 2017, five people walking and biking in Seattle were involved in collisions every two days.

That year was the third year in a row that more than 500 people walking were involved in collisions.

For far too many people, the choice to choose an active mode is rewarded by injury or possibly death.

According to the Move Seattle Levy work plan, Seattle will have completed 27 Vision Zero corridors by 2024, but the improvements on these corridors are in most cases minimal spot improvements.

How many corridors would be completed if we ensured that every single one was the highest quality possible?

What if the only outcome of our Move Seattle Levy in terms of Vision Zero was making Rainier Avenue safe for everyone who uses it?

That would be a better outcome than 27 corridors we can check off a list.

So far in 2019, we've already lost three lives walking and biking on our streets.

It's time to take off the rose-colored glasses and stop relying on 2006 to give us a good trend line.

It's time to systematically change our streets.

Thanks.

Thank you, Ryan.

Megan?

Thanks for letting me speak.

It was really awesome to be here yesterday.

I wanted to say farewell to O'Brien in November because I got to watch us battle for housing against, and it was on CNN, against Amazon and the big tax.

But first, there was like all these meetings downstairs, and I think you were the one who got them started.

I don't know, but there was a ton of meetings about affordable housing.

one of the only council members with a green vision, like, well, I know Sawant does and Mosqueda, but you really, like, stood out, you stand out for that.

And I'm going to miss the way you vote and the comments that are brought up.

And I'm only hoping, I'm hoping Sean Scott gets elected.

So anyways, yesterday, we envisioned how much power a mayor has and Burgess took over for that.

Anyways, Burgess took over and when he did, and then the housing thing got into this huge crisis, he steered us away.

from using the money the way that Mayor Moon would have used it.

And so it was really interesting to contemplate how much a public servant really leads us.

And now Durkin is threatening the women's shelter wheel.

And I know CCS supposedly supports Johnson and they got five million from Bezos.

So it seems like people are in others' pockets.

And if somebody called like about a priest that was gonna be at a church and like over 200 people called, we're weeding out all the priests that we don't like.

And if that many people called about a public servant, then I think that it's worth having at a public level to weed them out.

But anyways, I've seen people get mad at O'Brien too, though, for wanting housing.

And I thought, well, that's silly if they all organized.

I don't know.

That's kind of neither here nor there.

But for wanting something good and sheltering people, that would be on the spectrum of a virtue and not a sin.

Thank you, Megan.

OK, thank you.

Robert.

And Robert, you're going to be followed by Don Brubeck and then Vicki Clark.

So my name is Robert with Beacon Hill Safe Streets.

I bet most of you before.

I just came here today to one, bring up the fact that another person has passed on Rainier Avenue.

I'm sure you're aware.

This, this is like Groundhog Day.

You know, every year we come, we ask you to do the changes.

We're going to do them and then we don't do them and then we do it again and it delays another year.

We play this game.

I thought we finished outreach.

I thought we picked a design.

We all got mad that the bike lanes weren't there and they were replaced with bus lanes.

And yet, here we are still trying to get them on the ground and still getting these safety improvements out there that aren't just like, hey, we threw a flexi stick in the street.

See if anyone runs that over.

They do, by the way.

They're gone now at Henderson.

There's no more flexi sticks, I don't think, unless they came back and put them in.

The other thing I wanted to point out is I feel like it's, I know people at SDOT that do care, and I know you guys care, but it's a little frustrating to see things in the reports that come out wrong.

For example, SDOT took almost 11 months to release their traffic report.

And in it, they forgot several fatalities in Southeast Seattle.

And as far as I can tell, have not been corrected.

And it's very frustrating.

It literally erases someone's death.

And I actually ended up having to talk with the family to validate that someone died.

And they were offended when I pointed out that the city did not count their loved one as killed.

And they said they died within like two days after the crash.

And it was reported as an injury collision.

The man who was ran over by the Link light rail train was not counted.

The man who was killed at the other end of the Othello station when hit with a Link light rail train was not counted.

I mean, I think the least we could do is count the deaths that we are creating on our streets.

And I'm just so sad to see that we're delaying and delaying and delaying the things that might actually stop that from happening.

So thank you for listening.

Yeah.

Thanks for your ongoing advocacy, Robert.

Don?

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Donald Brubeck.

I'm here representing West Seattle Bike Connections, Safe Streets Group, that's part of the Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Coalition, to speak in favor of the Delridge Rapid Ride H multimodal corridor.

And I'll second Michael Taylor Judd's comments on the excellent outreach and involvement of the project management and outreach staff with us.

seeking input and actually going out and trying out routes on bikes with us.

So we support the design objectives for biking and walking connections to transit stops and to destinations along the route to create an all-ages and abilities bike corridor through the flattest and most direct routes available from White Center to the West Seattle Bridge.

This I think we do have some mixed reviews on the state of the design at 30% that the project actually removes bike lanes in the north part of the corridor.

That can be an acceptable tradeoff for a dedicated bus lane if the adjacent parallel 26th Avenue Greenway is upgraded to current standards.

It was the second one built and it does not slow traffic speeds or eliminate cut through traffic without additional safety improvements that we have outlined in a letter that's dated February 24th to the project team, and I'd like to submit that to you today as part of the record here.

And we have some other safety concerns in other spots.

We do really appreciate the work that's already been done on Juneau and Croft Place to link the two greenways.

Thank you.

Thank you, Don.

We can leave those.

We'll collect them.

Vicki, and Vicki, you're going to be followed by Gordon Padelford and then Andrew Kitty.

Good afternoon, council members.

Vicki Clark, Cascade Bicycle Club.

It's been a while.

Welcome back.

I'm here today to speak about Vision Zero.

While today's Vision Zero data shows deaths and serious injuries on Seattle streets trending down, it also shows we're not making changes to our streets fast enough.

Every death and serious injury on our roadway is a failure of our transportation system.

But it's more than that.

A failure to act with urgency to make our streets safer in the face of a proven roadmap, Vision Zero, is reckless.

It's a failure to act where a friend, neighbor, or family member could be the next one to pay the ultimate price.

It's a burden that's carried disproportionately by our most vulnerable transportation users.

All ages and ability bike infrastructure is essential to making our streets safer.

Bike lanes are a proven measure in creating streets with safer travel speeds.

They buffer people walking from fast moving vehicles and obviously they make safe places for people on bikes.

There's low-hanging fruit.

Repaving projects like 35th Ave Northeast must be completed in such a way that people on bikes are accommodated and that the old metric of moving cars quickly is replaced with the Vision Zero model, building a system that considers and keeps safe everyone.

There are long-delayed projects.

Phase 2 of the Rainier Safety Project is desperately needed and cannot be delayed further.

We need to act with urgency.

The city is planning to build just 2.3 miles of protected bike lanes and greenways this year.

That's 2.3 miles in a city with around 4,000 lane miles total, 2.3 miles.

That doesn't reflect the scope of changes needed to meet the Vision Zero goals and ultimately make sure all Seattle residents can be sure to get home safely.

We ask our city leaders today to commit to doubling down on the city's commitment towards Vision Zero.

Gordon.

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Gordon Padelford.

I'm the director of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

You know, Vision Zero is a really important and critical program and priority for the city, but sadly, it's been underfunded, under-supported, and really under-prioritized by both the departments and, I think, by our political leadership.

It is something that's critical to keeping everyone safe, no matter how they're getting around in our streets.

You're walking, you're biking, you're driving, you're catching a bus.

And speaking about Rainier Ave in particular, I think the community's right to be frustrated and right to ask why should we trust the city anymore to make our community safe.

This project was promised in 2016, then it was promised for 2017, and then 2018, and then 2019, and now we're hearing again from the mayor's office in SDOT, just wait, it'll come in 2020. And I'm sort of at the end of my line of making excuses for the city, and I think the council should really act exercise oversight over SDOT and the mayor's office and say, this is the most dangerous street in the city.

By far, people are dying.

There's a crash every single day on average.

Why haven't we done more to make this street safer for everyone?

The community is there supporting change.

Change is always hard, but the Rainier Beach Action Coalition, all the way to the Rainier Valley Chamber of Commerce are in support of making these changes.

This is something we just need to get done, right?

If this were a giant convention center or a new arena, it would have been done years ago.

And those are great projects.

I'm not slamming those projects.

But when we want to as a city, we can move heaven and earth to get these important priorities built.

And what are we doing for Southeast Seattle where we're just saying, oh, it's on the back burner and we'll get to it a few years from now?

Right?

I think that just is bad for everyone and it's a really bad look for the city and for all the goals we try and espouse.

And just echoing Vicky's comments, it's also just ridiculous that we're planning to build, you know, 2.3 miles of bike facility this year in Seattle.

So how are we actually going to make it safe for everyone to get around?

Because that's the city we all want to live in.

So thanks.

Thank you, Gordon.

Andrew?

Andrew, you're the last one who's signed up for today.

If there's other folks that would like to make a public comment today, please line up behind Andrew.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you for holding this.

My name is Andrew Kitta, and I'm with Rainier Valley Greenways.

I live in Southeast Seattle near Hillman City, and I walk and bike all over.

And I'm here to say that the current configuration of Rainier is a disaster.

It's basically a crash zone.

Last week, Vladimir was killed on Rainier Avenue.

And last summer, just a few feet away, my friend Alex was killed on his bike.

And while these people were killed, the city has delayed the Rainier Avenue safety project.

SDOT has plans now.

I've seen them.

The thing that continues to mystify us is why they're rolled out so slowly.

Why it really is mostly a question of paint.

So I just want you to work really hard at getting this done.

I also want to say that I live in a part of the city that has really gotten the short end of the stick on bike infrastructure.

and a variety of different funding.

And from the standpoint of view of equity, this is a really important thing to do now.

So thank you for supporting that.

Thank you, Andrew.

Is there anyone else who wants to provide public comment today?

I'll just note that we have some folks in the back that are holding a sign about Rainier Avenue who have been showing up at all of our meetings.

And I know you're not testifying at the microphone, but I appreciate the comments that you're making.

by your presence, thank you.

All right, we'll close public comment and move on to agenda item number one.

I'll invite presenters forward and Jasmine, if you don't mind reading it into the record.

Yes, this is an information item related to the Pike Pine Protected Bike Lane Design Workshop Update.

Welcome, everyone.

Why don't we start by a quick round of introductions for the record?

Joel Sisolak with Capitol Hill Housing.

Clara Cantor with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

Brie Geinkeld with Central Seattle Greenways.

Thank you all for being here.

And I'll let you guys decide how you want to start this presentation.

Well, I'll start us off.

As you all know, the Pike Pine Corridor is a very critical corridor for bike infrastructure in the city.

It's the route between Capitol Hill and downtown.

And it's a vital corridor in many other ways for the community, and we wanted to ensure that when safe infrastructure is put in, it meets the needs of others in our community as well.

So we're here today to talk to you about a community workshop that we hosted that we believe could also serve as a model for other projects in the city where when people have a chance to hear each other early in the process, the hope is that you can stop controversy from erupting later on.

The goal is to avoid surprises and make sure everybody gets to be heard.

So that's what we're here to talk about.

That's exciting opportunity for us to learn.

So look forward to it.

Jump in.

So this goes back a number of years.

In 2017, during the One Center City process, Central Seattle Greenways engaged with a number of other neighborhood organizations and started doing some initial business outreach, basically just informing business owners that changes were coming and asking about loading needs and their concerns about safety in the corridor, some initial questions, trying to engage them in the subject.

And then after city council passed the basic bike network resolution last summer, we prepared to work with SDOT planners and make sure that the design of those bike lanes would work for everyone on that street.

And we realized that we needed to do, we didn't have all the information we needed to advocate for the needs of the broader community.

So we started this process of creating this event.

And it was great timing for us, because just about every year, at least for the last seven or eight, the Capital Eco-District hosts a community forum on some topic related to sustainability for the neighborhood.

And we've, and some of you, I think all of you have been to one of these or another.

They've been on a variety of topics, everything from affordability to how to find pathways to ownership, to rent organizing, to living I-5.

And some of those ideas have really taken off.

This year, we partnered with folks here at this table and They had already planned to do an event, so it was actually really fortunate.

We had an event planner under contract, and the topic was really a great fit for us, too.

The protected bike lane in Pike Pine's been a priority for us for a while.

We are ardent supporters as well of Vision Zero, and we're part of the community package coalition that helped the city secure funds from the convention center, and part of that was $10 million for the Pike Pine protected bike lane Next slide, please.

So there were a couple of things.

I think as Clara mentioned, this goes back a number of years, but there are a couple of things that we did as a lead up to the event.

One of them was this pop-up protected bike lane as part of parking day.

And the next slide, please.

Yeah, we don't actually have...

Oh, we don't have the next slide.

That's okay.

We also did a bunch of business outreach because we knew that the folks who own and operate retail along that corridor were likely to be the most affected or certainly were the most concerned about impacts.

So we did a lot of outreach.

Beginning in 2017, the renter initiative partnered with Central Seattle Greenways to do outreach.

And then in the lead up to the event, again, Central Seattle Greenways, this time with support from GSBA, went out in teams and spoke with a lot of folks, and it was actually really gratifying that many of those folks came to the event.

They weren't all pleased about the project, but I think they felt heard.

Yeah, the workshop was a little bit of an experiment.

We didn't quite know exactly what was going to happen or how many people would come, but we had about 150 people participate in groups of 12. Each of those small groups, after we gave the whole room some context for what was going on and what we understood the city was considering, Then the groups identified the values that they shared and discussed how to balance the needs.

We had business owners at most of the groups as part of the conversation.

We had representatives from disability communities, and really almost everyone in the room is a pedestrian at some point, so that viewpoint was pretty strongly heard.

Each group was led by a trained volunteer facilitator and a map expert.

And what we provided groups with were maps of the corridor and some pieces made out of sticky notes.

And we didn't know how those would go over, but people really got into it.

It was great to have a physical thing to play with that was done to scale so you could see what would actually fit on the street and what wouldn't and understand the challenges of trying to meet all the needs for street users.

Another thing that worked really well were stickers.

When folks came into the room, we asked them to put stickers on their name tags that identified all the ways they used the street.

And the idea behind that was to remind ourselves that none of us use the street in only one way.

I am not just a cyclist.

I am not just a business owner.

You know, I have a dog.

I have children.

I eat at restaurants, whatever.

And that was actually tremendously successful.

People really enjoyed the stickers.

And I think it really did help folks kind of bond over all the ways they use the street.

We also got kudos for indoor bike parking.

Often at these sorts of events, the people who bike there actually feel like they have kind of been left out of the parking situation.

And we were able to provide bike parking inside the building so everyone could kind of keep an eye on their bike and feel secure and know it was there.

It also made quite a statement about all the people willing to bike out on a rainy night in October.

You can see the weather through the windows.

Yeah, you can.

So that was kind of fun.

The groups were led by fantastic volunteer facilitators and map experts who we'd trained.

And those folks were key to helping the groups use their time constructively.

And what we really heard from people was that the groups really did have constructive and productive conversations.

When we first scheduled the event, we heard from a lot of people concerned about the length of the event.

Asking people to come for three hours on a Thursday night plus, you know, half an hour beforehand to get their dinner and get settled seemed like a stretch.

But people got so engaged, they didn't want to stop the conversation.

They just wanted to, They really wanted to dig in and talk with each other, which was gratifying.

I mean, we all have a stake in our streets and care about them.

What was really gratifying is how much they wanted to hear each other's perspectives.

People talking to each other, understanding.

So people who bike, understanding the business owner's perspectives and vice versa.

People concerned about pedestrian safety, disability access, all that sort of stuff.

Able to have really...

really productive conversations about all the needs and the challenges of the street.

And one thing that we heard was that this is hard work, trying to figure out how to balance the needs.

So we heard some real appreciation for the job that SDOT planners do, which you don't always get to hear.

So that was kind of a perk for some of the, we did have some SDOT folks in the room to provide information, and it was great for them to hear that, I think.

At the end, each group shared their map and a worksheet with their conclusions.

No two groups had the same ideas, but they all had thoughtful ideas, and there were consistent themes that we'll share in a moment.

The workshop was really great.

I mean, we were all thrilled.

But we fell short in our goals for racial diversity and for disability representation.

And we'd also heard that a Thursday night isn't great for a lot of people for a lot of reasons.

It's not great for some parents.

It's not great for some business owners.

So we distributed a survey that was meant to parallel the workshop and we did more outreach.

And we also, you know, I went out and talked with the National Federation of Blind Folks and did some other outreach too to get some more perspectives.

But the survey went out and we got about 435 responses, most of them really substantive.

The themes and the priorities were pretty consistent with what we'd heard from the workshop and from our business outreach previously.

So that was good to see that there was some consistency there.

But it really made it clear how different it is to meet and talk to people face-to-face versus an anonymous survey.

Some of the responses were hostile or flip or cynical in ways that we didn't see in the dialogue in the workshop.

So it just really emphasized for us the importance of bringing people together to talk to each other and hear each other and work together.

Council Member Sawant, did you have a comment?

Thank you Council Member O'Brien.

Thank you for sharing all this with us.

One question I had was how, I mean obviously the slide you had where you had the whiteboard, not whiteboard but the paperboard, yeah, where that's useful, but it seems like people were discussing like general aspects of what they think should come into being.

Were there also discussions in this workshop?

Are there plans for future workshops to also discuss specifics of the pipeline biking network?

And the reason I'm asking is that we've had several phone calls from the people who live in the neighborhood about some specific things that they would like to see because they just, as you know, because you're biking yourself, you know what you need and what needs to be done.

So I wonder if there were specific things that came up and also I wonder if I can send you these things that we've heard and maybe get some back from you all just based on your expertise and maybe that can come up in a future workshop.

Yeah, and in terms of specifics, we captured some general things.

We wanted to really capture the shared priorities and the shared values because we knew for one thing that every group was going to come up with a different specific configuration, just the nature of the beast.

So a lot of the stuff is really general about shared priorities and suggested solutions.

The map itself shows specifically, so the different colored papers represent different things like whether It should be a two-lane, a two-way bike lane on the north side of the street or separate the north and south.

Not north.

Yeah, there's a color key that I don't actually have memorized at the moment, but yeah, they represent, and that one I believe you're seeing that there's a bike lane on each side of the street.

The magenta is the travel lane.

And then the other colors represent parking or loading zones or turn.

turn lanes.

So it's a little challenging to make out those.

But again, since we knew that the maps were not going to be the same from table to table, what we really wanted to make sure we had were the underlying principles and to surface any issues that we wanted to ensure the planners were keeping in mind.

And so that's what we were trying to do with the worksheet was really kind of pull those things to the top so that we could ensure, so that we had a way as advocates to look at the designs the city came up with and be able to see whether they met the community's needs.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

I mean one of our priorities was to make people feel like they were being heard and so we fully documented like all we have We hired Alex Garland to photograph the whole event.

And we documented everything and took pictures of every map.

And they are all different.

So we captured both kind of the granular differences as well as what people could agree on.

Thank you.

So we did capture all of the little granular details of the differences in people's designs, but the big things that people came together around were the big four priorities that we listed up here.

And these were overwhelming support from every table, from a lot of the surveys that we were hearing, from business owners, from people who live in the area, from people who visit the area just to hang out and play, to shop.

Everyone was agreeing on these four big things.

The pedestrian safety, comfort, and convenience was big for people.

A lot of the businesses in the area depend wholesale on the number of people who are walking up and down the street.

And we heard a number of people identifying specific intersections over and over again as specific places where they felt unsafe.

And we highlighted those in the data.

And then also that they wanted the space to be an even more safe, more comfortable pedestrian environment than it currently has.

You know, we heard people talking about the pedestrian environment in terms of wider sidewalks and better crossings and a better pedestrian realm as well.

The continuous, safe, intuitive bike route, there was some mixed ideas about where people wanted the bike route, but it was overwhelming that they wanted it to be continuous all the way from Broadway to 2nd Avenue, that it would feel continuous, that it would feel like one safe, intuitive route.

People wouldn't have to be winding around and following signs and not sure where they were supposed to go, and having it be predictable.

for people.

The loading zones for businesses and passengers was huge.

One of the biggest things that we heard from business owners was they're often really upset when there's a removal of parking.

For most...

when there's a removal of parking, what we heard almost overwhelmingly was it's not actually long-term parking in front of the stores that people are concerned about, it's loading zones.

And a lot of the outreach that's conducted in the city has loading zones slash parking.

And so a lot of those concerns are getting lumped together.

And the biggest concerns that we heard were loading for The businesses themselves, a lot of the loading zones are in the middle of the block and they're not particularly well enforced, which means that some of the larger trucks can't get in and out of them and we're ending up in the middle turning lanes, which is illegal but very common up there.

People were concerned about where those loading zones were going to happen.

And then for TNC vehicles for Ubers and Lyfts, also being able to come in and out of loading zones at the end of the blocks is a lot easier than pulling into the middle of the block.

And also just reduces the conflicts in terms of pedestrians and bikes and everyone else who's competing for space there.

And then just having a very clear, very predictable traffic flow for all users, whether you're driving, whether you're trying to catch a bus, whether you're biking, whether you're walking.

We heard this particularly from the blind community that it's If the traffic flow is off of where you think it should be or where you're expecting it to be, that creates a much more dangerous situation for all users.

And that was one of the biggest concerns that we heard about the bike lanes that are currently on Broadway, was just a general confusion of people not knowing where they were supposed to be, where they were supposed to be expecting traffic to be coming from, what was happening when those lanes are starting and ending, and all of that.

Are you talking about pedestrians or bicyclists?

For both.

People really wanted a clear, predictable flow for all kinds of traffic.

So as a car, knowing where the pedestrians are going to be, where the bikes are going to be, as a bicyclist, knowing where you're expected to be as a pedestrian, knowing which direction traffic is coming from and where you're expected to encounter it.

And those four things sound really intuitive, but if you look at a lot of Seattle's planning, a lot of those things aren't happening right now.

So we wanted to highlight those four things.

Next slide, please.

So just in summary, I want to pass these around so you can see all of the partners that were involved, and also because I have a stack of those in my office.

If you want more, let me know.

In general, I would say that the event was great.

The folks who were there, as Bree said, were really engaged.

They stayed.

It doesn't hurt to give them food and beer.

But people were really into the conversation, and there was a lot of, you know, there was some disagreement, but it was very civil.

So it was all in all, I think, a really good process.

And there were a couple, I don't know if Sam's here, but there were a couple of folks from SDOT as well as King County.

Hi, Sam.

And hopefully she'll give an amen on this, that said that this is really how This is really a model for community design.

This is people coming out, as Brie said, to see each other, look each other in the eye, and have real conversations about an important topic, and a topic that has its controversy.

So a big part of what made this successful is that it was community-led, and we brought people together from different perspectives.

It was also incredibly well planned, and I can say that because I had kind of a small role in the planning.

It was mostly the two here as well as Michaela Daffern from our office.

They just spent a lot of time, a lot of hours organizing volunteers, cutting up little pieces of paper, and really kind of keeping everything on track.

So kudos to them.

We hope that this can serve as a model, that the city and other neighborhoods can benefit from kind of the trial and error that we went through.

It's not perfect, as Brie mentioned.

We had some challenges in terms of getting the audience there that we really wanted.

But it was successful and we think that it should be replicated.

And I would go, a step forward, a step beyond just sort of sharing what we're sharing today, and suggest that the city may want to contract the planning team to create a toolkit for other neighborhoods, because not every neighborhood has a Clara and Brie and Michaela.

So we would like to make it easier, and maybe we can even have more permanent play pieces than Post-it notes.

So that's just a suggestion.

I really appreciate an opportunity to hear this presentation, and I'm really grateful for the work you do.

And I think just to build on the observations you just made, Joel, and what you all have said throughout the presentation, you know, oftentimes when the city shows up, you know, sometimes we make mistakes in how we design it.

But even when we're doing our best work, sometimes we're greeted with skepticism.

There are questions about whether you're here to tell us what you're gonna do, are you actually getting feedback?

And then it often turns into various groups showing up at a meeting to have a louder voice than another group at the meeting.

And when community members come together, really frankly without a lot of leadership from the city, but take it upon themselves and work through the differences, and folks show up and they're like, You know, the folks we're advocating to, that's a different room.

This is a room where we work on solutions and you all can present a set of solutions and help define where there's common ground, help us find where there's, you know, what we should prioritize and also highlight, you know, there's some challenges you're going to face and here's the areas where there's some tradeoffs and you're going to have to make it and folks know then where to show up to advocate for what those tradeoffs look like.

I think we have a potential for getting much better outcomes, so.

I really like the idea of what you did, and I like the idea of having a toolkit, and so I think we should think a little more about how we can.

how we can carry that over to other neighborhoods.

The neighborhood on Capitol Hill has some great advocates and also has a lot of people that are very engaged around these issues, which is not unique to Capitol Hill, but not every neighborhood is probably going to get 100 people out for three hours to work.

So how that fits different neighborhoods differently, you have to think through, but I'm really grateful for this.

I realize that we've neglected to mention that we were doing this largely for our own efforts to understand how we could best advocate for the community and to help to make sure everybody was involved in the process.

But we are obviously not the city.

So we have shared all of the information from all of our outreach with SDOT and have been working with the planning team to make sure that they have all the information input.

And they were very excited to get all of this too.

And Sam is here today to answer any questions you have on that front too.

So SDOT was at the, there were some SDOT people at the workshop also, or?

There were.

We invited representatives from SDOT and from Metro to the workshop to answer any questions participants had because we didn't want people creating a design that was physically impossible, right?

That just, you know, there were actual things that they didn't know weren't going to happen.

So it was really helpful to have those folks there.

Yeah.

And I will also mention that we gave people some specific, what we knew to be what the city was most likely to do, right, which was to put lanes on Pike between Broadway and Bellevue and then have lanes following the Pike Pine Renaissance down to second, long-term, permanent.

But we knew that wasn't going to make everybody happy.

So we told our facilitators that while they could not lead people down a different path if their group went rogue, we wanted to record that.

We wanted to know that.

And we did hear.

from many people at the workshop, and we heard it again and again on the surveys, and we've heard it from the businesses, that long-term, they really want to, probably the best way to do it is to extend the Pike Pine Renaissance all the way to Broadway, to have those be one-way lanes.

But one way or another, most everybody wants the westbound bike lane to be on Pine, and the eastbound to be on Pike.

as opposed to a couplet.

And instead of doing, having it be a couplet instead of having them both be on pike to a certain point and then moving people over to pine to continue, which is much less graceful.

So just to let you know that we didn't give people that option, but we knew that they were going to bring it up and they did.

So, and we've shared that with Estad as well.

Colleagues, I appreciate that work and I appreciate that SDOT's been involved.

I'm not going to put Sam on the spot right now, but I would love to have a private follow-up with the appropriate folks at SDOT to understand what are the next steps in this project and get a sense of where they are.

And I think it'd be appropriate to bring them back to committee at some point in the near future to talk about the next steps and what are the kind of interim investments and what are the long-term investments and how soon we can get them on the ground.

I just want to say thanks as somebody who has political ownership over a controversial protected bike lane You know to watch community members come together to try to find collaborative solutions is really great I think it also warrants mentioning that the fact that we have to spend so much time and energy going block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, in order to make it safer for people who choose to get around by bike to be able to do so.

It's an important amount of work, but I'm still, you know, as I enter closer and closer into my retirement as an elected official, I'm struck by how hard that work is and how easy it is for the infrastructure to be built that gets people in and out of cars every day.

And so I want to say just thank you to you guys for that work.

I know there are many in the audience who share that opinion who are within the bureaucracy who are working hard to do that too.

But we have a lot of work to do if, you know, it takes a set of great community organizers, 150 people being fed and well, you know, either caffeinated or liquored up, and then be given, you know, a great pathway for discussions to then a couple years later end up building, you know, a critical and important mile and a half of protected bike lands.

when we kind of snap our fingers and we build hundreds of millions of dollars of car infrastructure without batting an eye.

So I'm frustrated by that.

I'm grateful to you all for creating the space for us to not have this be a controversial topic if and when it comes to us, because that's really critical.

But I'm at the same time regretting that we have to spend so much time and energy on these little things when I feel like if we were all collectively making the decision a little bit differently, we could be bigger, bolder, and faster.

So apologies for the lamentation.

It's a little bittersweet for me, but I'm grateful to you all for the work.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Great.

I really appreciate your work, and we will clearly be back in touch shortly.

But thanks for your leadership on this, and thanks for being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

All right, colleagues, we're going to switch to another presentation on Vision Zero.

Jasmine, do you mind reading that into the record?

And I'll invite presenters forward.

Yeah, this is an information item related to the Seattle Department of Transportation Vision Zero update.

Oh, yes.

Welcome, everyone.

Why don't we start with introductions?

And I wanted to say, make a few opening remarks before I hand it off to you all.

Excellent.

Thanks for having us today.

My name is Jim Curtin.

I'm with the project development division at SDOT.

I'm Allison Schwartz, also with SDOT and the communications team.

Thank you both for being here.

I want to just echo some of the comments we heard in public comment today.

Some of the comments I've been receiving, frankly, over the last couple years, and I'm sure you have too, so I apologize that I'm going to maybe sound a little preachy and you know exactly what I'm going to say, but I will do it for the sake of just doing it.

This is such critically important work.

And I'm really grateful of the city's commitment to do this work.

It's been a few years since we made the commitment.

It was under another mayor and a different department director.

And I know you all have been through, you know, over a year without a permanent department director, which can make it challenging.

And at the same time, holding that reality with the fact that people are getting harmed on our streets.

And while we have some great planning and some good commitments, I think I share a lot of community's frustration that we haven't been able to move faster on this.

And I'm chair of the committee that oversees the work of SDOT.

And it's hard for me, you know, I've been an advocate long before I was here.

And now I'm here in a position of power and I feel also somewhat powerless to move this forward.

And so, I look forward to the presentation and I also want to, figure out what we can do collectively.

And, you know, this wasn't this mayor's presentation or commitment to make.

I want to believe that she's committed to Vision Zero and eliminating this, but really want to hear how she plans to own this and move forward and how we as a council can support accelerating some of the work.

And I'm hoping to hear that there's a lot of stuff that's in the works and it's just take a while and it's about to hit the ground and we can get kind of excited about that.

So take it away.

Thank you, Council Member.

I too want to just take a moment and just address some of the comments and thank everyone for being here to highlight the fact that what Ryan Packer said is 100% correct, that traffic fatalities on our streets is indeed a public health crisis.

In the United States last year, nearly 40,000 people were killed on our streets.

We know that these collisions are mostly preventable and do not have to happen.

I can tell you that there are 12 to 13,000 crashes on Seattle streets every year as well.

So while we do have a very safe transportation network here in Seattle, we have a long way to go to get towards Vision Zero.

Whenever a tragedy occurs on our streets, I know And I personally every morning check out the Seattle Times and my phone to see if anything happened overnight.

And we are working to accelerate the pace of our implementation.

Rainier itself has been technically challenging project, but we are moving forward and we are moving forward soon.

We have recently issued work orders to accelerate.

our projects out there, starting imminently with the reduction of speed limits on every arterial street in the Rainier Beach Urban Village, which includes Rainier Avenue South, includes South Henderson Street, Renton Avenue, portions of MLK to 25 miles per hour.

That will help.

And we will begin implementation of the phase two Rainier project this year.

We intend to finish with our 2019 work before school starts on September 1st.

But we also acknowledge that there is many places in the city that we need to be.

Before there was the tragedy on Rainier Avenue just days before, an older gentleman was hit and killed on Lake City Way at Northeast 85th Street.

Again, just trying to cross the street, and it highlights the fact that While we have projects on these streets, we have to rely on all of the tools that we have to reach our Vision Zero goal.

So what we want to do today is kind of really highlight the ongoing need for a continued comprehensive approach to getting to ending traffic deaths and serious injuries on city streets by 2030, which is what Vision Zero is about.

Okay, so we're going to walk you through really quickly here.

We're going to go a little bit over the background of our safety efforts here at the City of Seattle, talk about the data and the trends, projects, initiatives, and next steps as well.

To briefly run through the background here, In 1997, Vision Zero was launched in Sweden.

Allison and I got to meet the guy who spearheaded that over in Sweden, and it was actually something that they decided to move forward with because they saw so much momentum with NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration here in the United States.

They took a slightly different angle with Vision Zero and said street design is the major factor in determining whether a crash occurs and how serious that is.

In the year 2000, I'd like to tip the hat to the state of Washington because they were very much forerunners in safety.

In the year 2000, they launched their Target Zero program, which continues today.

In 2012, Seattle was the first city in the United States to declare that zero fatalities and serious injuries was our transportation safety goal.

And then in 2015, we brought it to Vision Zero, which was then subsequently codified through the comprehensive plan the year after that.

Thanks in part to your help in 2016, we also made a huge step forward by reducing our default arterial speed limit to 25 miles per hour.

We reduced the speed limit on all 2,400 miles of our non-arterial streets to 20 miles per hour and our downtown corridor here or core here to 25 as well.

We'll talk a lot more about speed limits later.

In 2017, we released our groundbreaking bicycle and pedestrian safety analysis, which was a proactive attempt to treat the symptoms of traffic collisions proactively.

And last year, one of our greatest accomplishments was to get that BPSA assessment into our complete streets checklist.

And I think this is a really important thing for everyone to understand.

The Vision Zero program itself has a smallish budget.

We have roughly $3 million a year to address safety on every street in the city.

But by including a review of crash data on our capital project development program, we're able to ensure that we, when we have the big dollars on our big capital projects, that we're not just going out there and essentially rebuilding things the way they are.

We are taking a thoughtful look at the crash patterns and we are developing solutions so that we can address those crash patterns and move forward.

So it's very much a budget multiplier for the Vision Zero program and I feel as if this is really going to help us achieve our Vision Zero goal moving forward.

So this, that's great to hear Jim and this bullet point is from last year so is that fully implemented in major capital projects going forward now?

Yes, that's correct.

And so stuff that's going to be implemented this year will have gone through that analysis or is there a little more lead time?

I don't know.

There is a little bit of time between when we're planning a project and we put together the complete streets checklist and when we're done with design and ready to build.

But yes, I think by the end of this year, you're going to start to see projects that have thoughtfully considered the safety data.

So we're very excited about this.

No one's asking you to delay other projects.

We know that's been a challenge.

But I hope that if there are other projects also in the works that are going on that didn't have the benefit of this, but there's obvious things we can do that we will take a few minutes to make some corrections there too.

Absolutely.

So as far as the trends go, we have had massive growth, as you know, in the city of Seattle, but we continue to be on the right track.

towards a safer street.

We are amongst the safest cities in the United States.

I believe the only city that has a better traffic fatality rate than the city of Seattle is New York City, which has hundreds of deaths per year, but they have 9 million people living there.

But we learn as much as we possibly can from our colleagues in New York City and across the country through the Vision Zero Network.

which is an organization that helps consolidate what's going on nationally on the Vision Zero level so that we can all, you know, go over our lessons learned and move forward towards safer streets.

I appreciate you highlighting that and I appreciate the tenor there, which is both you know, great that we're one of the safest cities in the country, and it's still not safe enough.

We clearly have work to do.

Yeah, we're, again, I think we're well aware that anytime someone dies on our streets, it's potentially a dad, a mom, a sister, a brother.

It's a loved one of someone, and we really take that to heart.

And also, I would gander and guess that most people at this table and in the audience tonight have experienced I know for myself I was in the third grade the first time this impacted myself.

This is something we should as a society be able to rally around quite easily in my opinion.

A powerful statement he repeated to the folks down at the Puget Sound Regional Council was shortly after the Amtrak failure about a year ago, where a few people died, and he was, you know, hauled out to committee hearings in Olympia to comment on that.

And as you've related to our committee up here, he said, yes, this is tragic that this happened, and I'm happy to talk through what we can do.

And you should know that every month, I forget the exact number.

Ten people die in the state.

And so if you want, you know, we have ideas about how to make this safer.

And so it's a little bit to the point that Councilmember Johnson made earlier.

What we get used to and what we accept and then how much we contemplate change.

And then you step back and look at the data and think about, wow.

You know, the numbers, Jimmy, you mentioned today, you know, I think about the world post 9-11 and how much the world has changed because of that horrific incident and obviously loss of life.

And you look at how many people have died in traffic fatalities since 2011 or 2009-11, 2001. And there's been, you know, it dwarfs the number and it pales in comparison to what the response has been.

I can, can I say amen to that?

So specifically, this is preliminary data.

I want to stress that the data may change, but it does appear as if we are coming off one of the better years for traffic deaths in the city of Seattle, which includes a 25% reduction in fatalities between 2017 and 2018. We had 14 total fatalities and 170 serious injuries.

We did not make a whole lot of progress on the serious injury front.

which is something that we are absolutely concerned about.

In many cases, those can be very close to fatal crashes, and in many instances, they are life-changing for the folks who are involved.

So that's why we want to look at not just the deaths, but also the folks who were seriously injured.

Pedestrians continue to be over-represented in our data.

In 2017, we had 11 pedestrian fatalities.

In 2018, we had eight.

So we're going the right direction, but that's still eight people.

We had four driver-passenger fatalities, one bicycle fatality, and one motorcycle fatality last year.

So a couple things I heard in public comment today.

One was just about the data.

And I've struggled with that myself, but I'm not in it as much.

Often I feel like when I want to get the data, I need to go do a Seattle Times search to read through the articles.

And so I don't know, are you able to address what we heard in public comment where someone said, hey, You know, I found these deaths that you guys aren't reporting.

Yeah, and we were aware of the incident on 15th Avenue South that Robert was referring to.

Our traffic operations, our transportation operations group actually manages the data.

And it's a partnership with the Seattle Police Department and the Washington State Patrol.

So the police department obviously fills out the collision reports and then we send them to the state so that the state can capture those as well.

There's a lag time and there are some communication issues that we are battling.

It is not uncommon in the United States for these issues to come up and actually our data here is actually in much better shape than in other cities across the country where there's six to eight months lag time between when a crash happens and when they get information about the circumstances involved.

We definitely have some room for improvement, but.

Okay.

So I imagine that the police are directly involved at the time of the incident and investigation that follows up.

someone may be injured, but if six months later that turns into a fatality, the police are probably out of the picture by that point, or are they not?

Not necessarily, but there are mechanisms in place.

To go capture that?

To go capture that.

And occasionally one of those things falls through the cracks.

That's one of my priorities to make sure those things are eliminated and that we are on top of every single fatality or serious injury that occurs in our city.

The other comment on this graph was, you know, I'm not sure what happened in 2006 or what happened before that, but obviously the drop from 2006 to 2007 is great.

I am, you know, if we were to fit a line to the data points and eliminate 2006, that trend line would be quite a bit different.

It may be flat.

Sure.

I think if I understood the public comment, I can't remember who made it out there, it's like, hey, it's about time to drop 2006 off and let's see what we've done in the last 10 years.

And so, just want to make sure we're not playing games with the data to show that trend.

And or something there.

Sure.

Yeah.

I think that's a really insightful point.

And I believe that came from Ryan as well.

And, you know, he's right.

In 2006, we had far more vehicle fatalities.

And what we're seeing over the years is that drivers and passengers are involved far less in these types of crashes.

because of airbags and all the different technology that's going in to make vehicles safer.

Pedestrians and bicyclists, we don't have same steel chassis to protect us.

And so it's up to us as a city to design our streets so that when somebody inevitably makes a mistake, the consequences aren't death.

So we have a couple more slides here on data and trends.

This one here, year over year, we see the same set of contributing factors to crashes.

We see distraction, impairment, speeding, and failure to yield consistently.

And other cities across the country face the same issues.

With the last year of data set, again, preliminary, we're seeing distraction now as a second top cause, and impairment contributing to 50% of the fatal crashes last year.

So an issue to continue to work on.

And then we're also seeing speeding, particularly high-end speeding.

So when folks are going 10 miles or more over the speed limit in conjunction with impairment, leading to the really, really bad crashes.

Allison, I wonder if I may interrupt, Mr. Chair.

You know, we as a city get to control two of those variables, but not necessarily the other two, right?

We can do a lot to design our streets to make them safer for people.

We can do a lot to enforce the speed limits and lower those speed limits, recognizing that people, for the most part, feel comfortable going five miles an hour or so over the speed limit, right?

So the more we ratchet it down, the more we get in that safety zone where if people are struck there or not, dead, but they are surviving that incident.

However, more and more of the national data is pointing to these fancy devices as being the largest or larger contributing factor, and your data is saying a 300 percent increase in distracted driving just in the last three years alone.

That is very scary.

I assume that that's what other cities are seeing.

Is there a movement afoot at the state level or at the national level to contemplate a ban on data sharing, for example, within cars?

I've been told that technology exists that would allow for you to get access to data, but only in a hands-free environment, not with a device in your hand.

I'm curious about what the state of the national practice might be about how we can get, particularly at the distraction element here.

It seems as though driving a car while operating your cell phone is becoming more and more the norm, and that is what's leading to more and more deaths on the roads.

I'm not familiar with national level related to that.

I don't know if Jim is.

Yeah, I think, you know, here in Washington State, obviously, we have a much more strict law about using your phone while driving.

And that was really spearheaded by Public Health Seattle and King County, as well as our partners up at UW Harborview Medical Center.

And moving forward, I am aware of movements within the Vision Zero network to try to expand those more strict laws across the country.

I recently got back from a trip where it was the norm to still talk on your phone and it was interesting to say the least and quite frankly from my perspective frightening.

But I do think that there's going to be a lot of consternation, discussion and consideration of stricter laws and the ability to get that information into the hands of law enforcement when something bad does happen.

I know there's a bill in Olympia this year that was introduced that made a visual verification a higher level of infraction as we continue to contemplate what that looks like, I think that'll be interesting.

But, you know, the solution here can't be to put a police officer on every corner and peek in your window.

The solution has got to be, as technology evolves and as we get smarter and better, and as cars are doing a better job of keeping us safe, they could be doing a better job of keeping us all safe by making some of those small-scale tweaks, which I've been told are possible, but just are continuing to be met with Pardon the pun, roadblocks.

Yeah, I definitely have heard of different technology out there that is available.

I do think they're working out some kinks right now.

Like, for example, you know, for the technology to understand when you are the driver and when you are a passenger being, you know, one of the things that's an issue.

But I think you're spot on.

Do we have any data in here to segregate amongst the, what I would say, the typical consumer driver?

versus professional drivers, I'm thinking Uber and Lyft rely on these exclusively in delivery more and more.

And I want to hope that as professional drivers that those companies are keeping an eye on things and those are actually safer use.

But I'm curious if we have data either locally or nationally about if there's, if accidents are happening there at the same rates with everyone else, then we got a real problem.

And that's a regulatory.

It could be a weapon.

We're doing an analysis on that right now.

Did you guys get the results of that back?

No, we rely on data reported from the companies.

So there's that.

But I don't believe that in our own crash data, we haven't seen necessarily like a higher incidence of TNC drivers involved in crashes.

I will say, and we'll touch on this more later under kind of the education component of things, is that we are continuing to work with TNC and cab companies to not only reach riders and passengers with information, but also to talk to their drivers about how they serve as professional drivers and the role that they have to play in Vision Zero.

And then I would add one thing to kind of outside the policy and regulatory technology discussion.

Another thing that we'll touch on in a moment is how we can use technology for good in an educational awareness campaign.

We ran a safe driving competition that got some really positive behavior change results, including reductions in distractions.

All that to say it takes so many different ways to get at each of these issues, and that's the approach that we're going to continue to take.

So a couple more things on this slide is in terms of failure to yield to pedestrians, Jim will talk more about this in a moment, but we are looking at putting in leading pedestrian intervals.

which can contribute, and New York City has seen a reduction in, a 30% reduction in ped fatalities, and they can attribute some of that back to things like leading pedestrian intervals, just giving pedestrians, you know, a three to seven-ish second head start at the crosswalk.

I also want to really highlight who is most impacted by fatal crashes, and many folks who provided public comment touched on this as well, People walking, people biking, people motorcycling are vastly overrepresented in our data set.

Also older adults, the two recent fatalities that we saw in Lake City Way and Rainier Beach were over the age of 75. And that's commonplace in our pedestrian fatality data sets.

So as Jim mentioned, these are people who are not protected by vehicles.

And as you age, you're just not able to recover as quickly as you are.

I think this is our last slide on data and trends.

So to wrap this up, we see most of, about 90%, So it looks like our map is a little bit, our legend is a little fuzzy there.

Like our fonts did not come through, sorry about that.

So don't pay attention to the icons and the legend.

But we see about 90% of our serious and fatal crashes happening on arterials.

And even though this map is small, you can kind of see some of those arterials pop out.

Just wrapping up kind of the data component of this, while it's really critical that we rely on data to make our decisions and where we make investments, it's also really critical that we remember that each point on this map, each dot, represents a human, a person who either lost their life or was seriously injured.

So these dots, and I noticed in the back of the room, the white silhouettes that someone brought that are across the city are daily reminders about what this work is about.

And Vision Zero kind of helps us set the framework that even though this kind of stuff happens every day, it is not acceptable and shouldn't be tolerated.

So traditionally, approaches around traffic safety have focused on the three E's of engineering, enforcement, and education, and we're continuing to do that.

I will note they're not all weighted equally.

We as an agency are responsible for the engineering component.

We work with enforcement.

We also do public education.

Equity more and more across cities, as it should, is leading, we should be leading our framework around this, around equity too.

And we are, as we use data to decide and define where we're working.

And so we put our investments towards the places that need it most.

And more often than not, those overlap with communities of color.

want to point out that at SDOT we have colleagues who are building out a transportation equity program and so we have a great opportunity there to work with them on making sure that safety is incorporated into their work as they develop an equity agenda and that equity is represented in our work as we move forward with Vision Zero.

I think we're going to talk a little bit more about how we're also So working harder across the department to reach historically underrepresented communities and how we engage them.

One of the commenters earlier today pointed out that effort in Delridge.

But with Vision Zero, we really want to make sure that we're talking to people in communities of color, talking to limited English proficient folks with information about how to use our streets safely.

And then we're also working with SPD on a racial equity toolkit related specifically to enforcement that should be ready this spring.

Okay, so I think we transition now into projects and what we have in the works.

Safety corridors being the lead, I think, program for the Vision Zero program.

And thanks to funding from the Levy to Move Seattle, we have a ton of projects in the works.

The last two years, we've implemented six projects.

And this year alone, we're looking at eight or more, depending on the availability of our crews.

So we are really ramping up our efforts here.

And I think you'll notice, if you haven't already, major changes across the city.

Northeast 65th Street is under construction, will be substantially complete in May. 35th Avenue Southwest Phase 2 is under construction as we speak.

Rainier Phase 2, as I mentioned earlier, we are moving forward with this year, absolutely.

And we have projects in just about every corner of the city.

I also want to mention that we'll be working in the Central Business District every year until our levy expires, until we find another funding source there.

And what you'll see we're doing in the Central Business District is we're really focusing on those.

pedestrian crossings.

We're focusing on protecting pedestrians at intersections by putting in protected turn faces as well.

But we have high hopes for the safety corridor program because we know the street design is the critical element in the survivability of a crash.

And by adjusting those street designs, we can set expectations for everybody who's using our streets.

The controlled turn movements in the Central Business District, those have been phased in starting a couple years ago.

Maybe it's not that long.

And as of the pedestrian, sorry, leading pedestrian.

Intervals.

Intervals, thank you.

Are we starting to see, is it premature to get any data there?

It's a little early.

I think we have, I'll talk a little bit more about LPIs in a little bit.

We have 43 in place right now, and we are evaluating hundreds of other intersections.

We intend to install a minimum of 50 per year moving forward, but most likely a whole bunch more than that as we develop our policy and see their effectiveness.

But I'll talk more about that in a second.

I just want to offer that as somebody who represents a mile and a half stretch of something that may not be substantially complete from SDOT's perspective until May, Jim, but is for all intents and purposes substantially complete for the community's perspective, the protected bike lane that we've constructed on 65th between 20th and I-5 interchange has already resulted in a lot more users, a lot more folks that are using that corridor than would have otherwise, who tell me even though we don't have the Stations up yet that they feel a lot safer because it's clearly a place where it's okay for them to be The cars are not weaving in the way that they were before and that in particular Intersections where we've installed in one particular intersection.

We've installed a leading pedestrian interval That was a place where we had a pedestrian fatality a few years ago And we're seeing a lot safer turn movements in that neck of the woods.

And so these are working.

And it has been, we did require a little bit of money and it took a little bit of time, but it is making a big impact on people's lives.

Nothing is perfect.

More people want more crossings.

We want wider sidewalks.

We want better lighting.

I mean, all of those things are continuing to be part of the to-do list.

the project elements that we've implemented so far are already making the street feel a lot safer for a lot of my neighbors and they're grateful.

That's great feedback.

Thank you very much.

Speed is one of the cornerstones of our program as well.

I don't really have to remind you of this.

I think I've said it three times already, but it is the critical factor in this viability of crashes.

It's simple physics.

But Seattle has been leading the nation in the way that we are looking at and evaluating and adjusting our speed limits.

And again, thank you to your help with that.

Back in 2016, Since then, we've had an aggressive program to look at not just where we want to adjust speed limits, but how we set speed limits.

And our team has been featured across the country, basically, with the pioneering work that we're doing.

Interestingly enough, the FHWA actually does allow cities to use something other than the 85th percentile to set speed limits.

which was buried in a document that we found, and we've been able to pilot using the 50th percentile speed to set speed limits based on how fast vehicles are going, but also Do we have high volumes of pedestrians and bicyclists?

Do we have transit activity?

Do we have a lot of driveways that are causing conflict?

So we're looking more, not just at how fast or how slow vehicles are driving, but what's going on on the street.

And I think it's a much more holistic way to set speed limits.

And we're super excited about our work plan moving forward.

which we have accelerated since last time we were here a couple of years ago.

Again, we've reduced those speed limits on all non-arterial streets to 20 miles per hour.

And since 2016, we've reduced speed limits on about 200 miles of arterial streets.

We are focusing on our urban villages because we have 80% of our pedestrian collisions occurring in those areas.

So it's a really strong data point that really has helped everybody at SDOT rally around this plan here.

And as you can see, we're about a third done with our urban villages, and we will complete our work within the urban villages in the next two to three years.

In addition, we're looking at arterials that do not run through urban villages.

those projects we really want to adjust the design of the street so that we can achieve lower speeds, create those more comfortable crossings for folks who are trying to catch the bus and where we can get in those bike facilities as well to create a nice environment for everyone without vehicles whipping by at 45 miles per hour.

So we're very proud of the work that we've been doing on speed limits and we feel like we have a really aggressive approach moving forward to evaluate and adjust the entire city of Seattle and just the near future, really.

That's great.

So, Jim, your comment about federal regulations, I didn't totally track that, but I think maybe what I heard was that previously our ability to reduce the signed speed limits required a certain amount of study and engineering.

And is it accurate to say that we've discovered that maybe there's a little more flexibility, which would allow us to move more aggressively?

That's exactly right.

The 85th percentile has been kind of the golden number, if you will, for traffic engineers forever.

And there's been some great work done across the country on this, including at the Washington State DOT.

A gentleman there did some research into where the 85th percentile came from.

Nobody knows, right?

But he found out that it was used on a highway project in rural Ohio in like the 1960s.

And for some reason it stuck.

And Seattle is not rural Ohio.

So it's not a one size fits all equation there.

So we're really, really happy that we found that flexibility.

And we also have, you know, a city traffic engineer who's really, really excited to push this as far as we can here.

Simply changing the number on a sign or when there's no sign simply having a different policy won't necessarily communicate to the users it's different.

And so enforcement is a piece of this and design obviously is a big piece of it.

And design we know takes time.

But that said, I think there's a lot of folks that are anxious to like at least get the signage up or whatever it is so that at least we can start.

And maybe we only get small returns on that immediately.

I'm excited that we have some opportunity to move aggressively and love to support that.

Excellent, excellent.

Yeah, it's all about awareness, right?

Like, you get those new signs up, they're super reflective, people see them as drivers.

You come into the city of Seattle, you cannot pass a speed limit sign when you are entering the city.

Whether you're coming in at 145th on Rainier or coming off an off-ramp here at James Street, you're passing a sign.

You've got them up everywhere.

Yep.

That's great.

Okay, and here's the LP eyes we did have a video that was attached to this here to demonstrate what an LPI Is and it looks like it's here.

Oh good.

I'll say councilmember Johnson.

I could act one out, but It might not work we'll just

Well, we might need a reenactment.

That would be pretty entertaining.

But in general, pedestrians get the walk signal while all the drivers have the red.

That allows them to be in the crosswalk, take the crosswalk, and be seen by drivers.

Typically, in Seattle, we're using a three to seven second head start.

But across the country, it's been more like 3 to 10. So we're trying to develop a policy that pushes us towards the longer end of that scale here.

But as I mentioned earlier, we have 43 of these that have been installed.

We have a list of hundreds that we are looking at right now.

We also recently received a grant from the Washington State DOT to install these throughout the city of Seattle.

They typically will reduce pedestrian crashes by 40 to 60%.

That's just general crashes, all crashes of all types.

And what New York City has seen, where they've installed nearly 2,000 of these already, one of the only cities in the country, if not the only, where pedestrian fatalities are actually falling.

So after consulting with our colleagues in New York City, And kind of noting that this is one of the things that we really hadn't been embracing as a city.

We've fully brought this into the fold at SDOT, and we are really excited to start rolling these out on a regular basis.

It's been a while, Jim, since I've read the research, but the last time I was current, it seemed like a lot of our collisions were happening with left-turn movements.

Are we prioritizing these LPIs for those left-turn collisions where we see a high volume of left-hand turners, for example, and allowing pedestrians to take the crosswalk before so that We've got a better visual.

Yeah, and ideally we'd like to Have those be protected only left-hand turns as much as possible so that we eliminate that left turn conflict altogether I like to think that we're in many ways we overload drivers with things that they need to do right and think about sitting at the intersection of Lake City Way and 125th on a rainy night in December and you're trying to make a left turn and You have to gauge oncoming traffic.

You have to make sure there's nobody in the crosswalk.

You have a lot to do.

And if you have any distractions in your vehicle, kids maybe, you know, that compounds everything.

So if we can eliminate the kind of fudge factor that we have out there and really just organize and structure our roadways so that things are much more predictable, I think we're going to start really seeing results there.

We are prioritizing our LPIs based off of our BPSA.

And also our...

BPSA being Bicycle Pedestrian Safety Analysis?

Yes, sorry, sorry.

BPSA, Bicycle Pedestrian Safety Analysis.

We'll roll off my tongue soon.

That's beautiful.

And we're also looking at high crash locations as well.

Regarding enforcement, this is an E that I think is really critically important, particularly for the impairment issue, which is a hard one for us to get at.

I think Vision Zero has really been a game changer as far as our partnership with SPD.

We've now been meeting with them monthly since 2015 where we go over the details of recent crashes.

We talk about our emerging issues and basically set forth our enforcement priorities for the near future.

Obviously, this is a data-driven model which SPD completely embraced and that was under the previous administration where they had to place a high value on data-driven work and had their whole CSTAT program in which they would review crime and transportation safety information.

We have partnered with the Traffic Collision Investigation Squad so that we can get their forensic science information.

So a bunch of engineers and planners on my team have gone through background checks, were able to go over to SPD and read through the amazing amount of information that they collect that we had never had access to before.

So we are learning so much more than we ever have.

It's been quite enlightening to say the least and we're gonna continue that work moving forward.

It's our desire to make sure that we know about every pedestrian and bicycle collision in particular that happens in the city and the details of those crashes so that we can understand the circumstances and develop solutions that are appropriate for those issues.

It's so great to hear that that collaboration is happening and I'd be interested in Connecting with some of those folks and maybe inviting them to committee to talk about their expertise, you know, that's Obviously by the time they're investigating something's happened.

And so it's after the fact but you know in a minimum Let's make sure we learn some lessons from them and that might be really valuable Councilmember Johnson was mentioning the distracted driving and how technology is hurting us on that front The flip side on on Impaired driving.

I'm wondering With, you know, the increase of ability of, you know, Uber and Lyft and more transit available in our city, are we seeing reduction in the impairment?

Is there an offset in technology or does that continue to be?

I think it continues to be our top issue.

I'd like to say that we've seen a reduction, but year after year, it's the number one factor in fatal crashes.

I want to believe that more people are taking transit or an Uber or a Lyft whenever they're going out, but it's always been the case that for every driver that the cops get, there's, you know, assumed to be many others that slip through the cracks.

This is a huge, huge issue, and I don't want to steal Allison's thunder, but we have recently renewed our partnership with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and we have some things in the works to address that from a kind of education and awareness perspective.

But we clearly rely on SPD and their DUI patrols to get out there and nab people.

And over the holidays, we had a really long deployment with SPD, a really long emphasis patrol around impairment.

And they did a wonderful job of nabbing many, many, many people who should not have been behind the wheel.

And we subsequently had a really relatively safe holiday season here in Seattle.

Well, again, Council Member Johnson earlier mentioned Potential for technology to help with distracted driving and we require, you know, for certain individuals who are chronic DUI offenders to have vehicle locks.

And we shouldn't rely on just, you know, that should be a standard equipment on any motorized vehicle that you have to do a little breathalyzer to unlock it.

I know, I agree.

Washington State tends to have some of the strictest DUI laws in the country as well.

But, you know, the laws don't do enough, and after a few drinks, your inhibition is gone.

So it continues to be a tall order for us, but one that we...

are really thinking about.

Photo enforcement is another thing that, of course, we've deployed successfully here in the city of Seattle in our school zones.

We are looking to install new cameras before the next school year begins.

We also are looking at the red light camera program as well, which is had an amazing impact on intersection safety.

We've dropped collisions at intersections where those cameras have been deployed by nearly 25%.

That's a very challenging mark to hit.

That's great.

That's great news.

OK, so we're going to touch on education, which we've talked a little bit about.

But just to give you an understanding of the framework that we are working around, last year we put together a strategic communications plan that centers around a goal of building awareness.

shifting attitudes and behavior.

We're talking about cultural change and shifts to ultimately change behavior.

And we identified four key strategies and also a tactical approach that, again, I'm probably sounding like a broken record at this point, but that just looks at a variety of different ways to reach people because that's what it takes.

We like that book of records.

So how do we know if we're building awareness?

Well, every couple years SDOT runs a statistically significant customer satisfaction survey.

And this past year, we were able to slide in a question about whether people had heard of Seattle's Vision Zero effort to end traffic deaths and serious injuries.

35% of people had.

It's a start.

Most importantly, it sets a baseline for us to understand where we are and that there's opportunity to grow that and continue to measure it over time.

Later this month, we're gonna be kicking off, actually just next week, some market research with a research firm, focus groups with folks across the city to understand, better understand people's kind of general perceptions around traffic safety, their understanding of what Vision Zero is.

So we can really start to ground our education and messaging approach on data.

So what are some of the things that we're doing when it comes to education and communications around Vision Zero?

Well, we are definitely focusing back on the top contributing crash factors.

We are also, as I mentioned earlier, focused on reaching communities of color and people with limited English proficiency.

We have partnerships with radio stations that are reaching key audiences like young men who are often behind the wheel and responsible for many crashes.

We're reaching Spanish speakers and I'm working on a new contract with Runta Somali News where we're trying to get more ethnic media partnerships going.

So I'm really excited because we're working with Runta News to put together like five or six in-language videos on a number of traffic safety topics with folks in that community.

Also part of that partnership will spark some conversations with East African TNC drivers and we'll also be able to run ongoing ads and stories in that publication.

So that's just one example of how we need to kind of expand our reach in those communities.

Around the issue of impairment specifically, Jim mentioned we've been working with Lyft and Uber and Yellow Cab in the past, but specifically with Lyft over the past almost four years around the issue of impairment, where they have provided in-kind donations for discounted ride codes that we then promote at different events on social media, things like that.

We have an upcoming one in April centered around 420 and cannabis use, kind of dispelling myths around impairment, not just involving drunk driving, but drug driving as well, and that's something that we're seeing increase across the state.

So dispelling some of those myths and engaging with private partners to help provide people with, there are so many choices and options and alternatives out there.

You shouldn't be driving impaired, but how do we get that out to people is what we're continuing to work on.

We're also building a really good relationship with the MADD board chair at the state level.

And then we continually work with the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.

There's an upcoming, they offer annual grants, and so we're likely going to put together a proposal focused around education when it comes to impairment.

I also wanna just mention, given the folks in the audience and who provide a public comment, that we work in partnership with Seattle Neighborhood Greenways around events like the World Day of Remembrance, around supporting putting up the white silhouettes, and more recently around a pledge for folks to use the word crash, not accident.

So we rely on and are working on building out partnerships with organizations across the board, other agencies, and individuals, really.

We need to remember that we're all making decisions as we're traveling about the city, and anything could happen to any one of us.

So how can we get the message out?

How can we humanize this issue to help shift and work towards the behavior that we're looking for?

I like the idea of providing a small alligator in each car too.

Yes, that was our distracted driving campaign.

I think I'd keep my hand on my side.

Yeah, I think we also had a jar of bees and something else, a snake.

Snakes would work for me also.

So a couple new initiatives to look out for in 2019 is a follow-up, a second phase of the bicycle and pedestrian safety analysis, which the initial study looked at crashes from 2007 to 2014. And the second phase will use a new exposure model and also include an additional three years of data and then include protected bike lanes for the first time.

I mentioned this a little earlier, but Seattle's safest driver was one way that we've used technology for good in the fight against distracted driving and lowering speeds.

So in 2017, we teamed up with an app company and with Pemco Insurance, and we offered cash prizes to safe drivers, and the app measures whether you're speeding, distracted, harsh braking, that kind of stuff, and gives you feedback after each trip.

You can compete against your friends and family members and things like that.

And so we engaged 4,000 people across the region in positive behavior change.

We were able to see results, which is what we're after.

It's hard to measure that sometimes.

So to be able to measure it just like that was outstanding.

And we're looking forward to running that competition again this spring, again with the help of Pemco, but with even bigger prizes.

Does that contest use your phone to measure it or other technology in the car?

There's technology in your phone that can do math that

Wow.

Yeah.

I was part of the Washington State road user charge pilot about pricing on roads.

But you put one of those little devices in your car for them to get the data, which was great.

But it was also available on the app.

And as I started to play around with it, you could see.

It scored every trip you made, and it was like speeding, cornering, braking, and there was a fourth one, I can't remember what it was, but it's great in a household with a teenage driver, and my wife and I, I could go on there and see how they did.

And they pretty quickly could see how I did, and we would compare notes on different things.

Well, we had a fun time last year comparing notes with SPD and who were better drivers.

Excellent.

We won't ask the results on the record.

So the other two items on this slide, this summer we're going to be putting out a new online dashboard that helps tell the Vision Zero story and kind of weaves together the data with kind of narrative and hopefully some personal stories that also kind of just weave everything together.

And then lastly, we're working on developing a three-year partnership with SPD that's focused on conducting Pedestrian safety emphasis patrols.

So those are instances where We in advance tell the community and tell the media that we're gonna have plainclothes officers Crossing the street at unmarked intersections because every intersection is a legal crossing and then you've got another officer down the street and in case people are not following the rules and and The point there is just to educate folks and provide education and a warning and possibly enforcement, but really it's that just raising awareness behind that issue.

Yeah, who yields to who.

That's great.

I think the next slide is kind of redundant, but this was all meant to be a little bit of a sneak peek on a bigger progress report that we will be issuing this spring with more information about our Vision Zero Corridor projects, what we've been doing over the past two years, and what's to come later this year and into next year.

I really appreciate your ongoing work and the team that's doing this stuff.

I appreciate hearing how you're incorporating some of this work to the broader work of ESTA, which is great.

I appreciate your kind of acknowledgement of the frustration that despite good work and despite being one of the safest cities, we still have a lot of work to do.

I'm interested in working with community members, including folks who testify and are active on social media or sending us emails that really care about this, about what What's a set of investments that we could be looking at this budget year to really make sure that, you know, we're trying to live up to this goal and we're on target to hit that 2030 goal, maybe even accelerate it.

So, and so, there's a lot of people out there with a lot of great ideas, but we'd love to hear your ideas, you know, if we had another, you know, X amount of dollars, you know, we could do more corridors or we would invest in this or what that might look like.

Because I know there's a lot of public demand for it.

No one's against safety.

Prioritization is a challenge.

But I think that's something that a lot of us on the council would be interested in working on.

So I certainly would.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

I think we can get back to you with the ideas that we have.

I know I have some thoughts on it that would take another hour to go through with you guys.

We'll hold you to that.

But I would look forward to chatting with you guys about that in the near future.

Thank you both.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

All right.

We're going to try to get to the next two items in 15 minutes.

Invite presenters forward.

Agenda item number three, Council Bill 119473, an ordinance granting the University of Washington permission to maintain and operate a pedestrian tunnel under and across Northeast Pacific Street, west of Montlake Boulevard, northeast for a 10-year term, renewable for two successive 10-year terms.

Would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure.

I'm Amy Gray and I work with the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Amy, I think you might win the award for the most visits to my committee since I've been here.

I don't know if that's unique to me or it's just the reality of the work you do.

Well, I think it's a little both.

I like coming here.

A lot going on.

So go ahead and jump on and walk us through this.

Sure.

So the proposed term permit ordinance in front of you is to allow the UW to continue operating and maintaining a pedestrian tunnel under Northeast Pacific Street.

And it was originally permitted in 1985 and included a vehicular tunnel at the time.

And this vehicular tunnel was taken out.

as part of the construction of the link light rail station at the UW, and also the reconfiguration of the streets.

And so this is now just for an existing pedestrian tunnel.

Where was the vehicular tunnel?

I've never actually even been in that pedestrian tunnel.

I've seen the escalators.

You could drive over to the hospital?

You would access the garage.

It was a bizarre intersection, so it didn't make a lot of sense.

I'm not helping my time frame here, so I will stop asking random questions.

I can get back to you with details if you'd like.

So this pedestrian tunnel connects the Triangle parking garage to the UW Medical Center.

And I realize that my maps on my presentation materials were a little small.

So that's the location.

And you can sort of see that it access, it goes from the triangle garage.

And here's some images as if you're walking from the garage into the tunnel.

And then on the other side, the other image is the escalators coming up at the terminus.

There's also elevators there for people who cannot use escalators.

but the escalators are on private property, so not part of this permit.

And the tunnel is approximately 800 square feet in the right-of-way.

And the fee for when it was originally expired in 2015, and they've been operating under the existing terms, is $1,680.

We don't require bonds for public agencies.

So the UW, we assume, is going to be around for a long time and won't walk away from their obligations.

So we don't require a bond for that.

It seems prudent.

And we're here today recommending approval of this term permit ordinance.

Great.

Existing infrastructure, renewals, pretty straightforward.

I appreciate the update on all this.

Council Member Johnson, you okay with moving forward with this?

I'd move adoption of Council Bill 119473.

I will second.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Thank you very much.

Next item.

Agenda item number four, Council Bill 119434, an ordinance relating to the appropriations for the Dow Ridge Multimodal Corridor Project.

Great.

Welcome, everyone.

Let me start with introductions.

Calvin Chowdhury, Council Central staff.

This is some...

I'm sorry, go ahead.

I'm Maria Kingeter with SDOT's Transit and Mobility Division.

CJ Holt, SDOT Capital Projects Project Manager.

And Lorelei Williams, STI, Interim Deputy Director over Capital Project Delivery.

Great.

Good to see you all.

I'm just going to acknowledge that there's a lot of important information here.

We may not get through in 12 minutes, so I apologize for my lack of staying disciplined on time at the moment.

But we'll give it as much time as it needs because this is an important project and I'm excited to hear about it.

Okay, great.

I'm going to do a quick introduction, and then I'm going to let CJ and Maria drive the presentation from there.

So we were actually originally scheduled to come and talk to you in December of last year.

And at that point, we had received estimates for our stormwater of the project and we just felt that as an agency we needed to take a closer look at that and work further with SPU and refine our estimates and really develop the project so that we felt good proceeding beyond the 30% design milestones.

We've spent some time both with the community and with SPU and our engineers to get us to where we are today and we feel very confident now that we are in a good place to move beyond the 30% design milestone.

And I will let the team talk to you about specifics.

And we've been joined by Council Member Herbold.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Lorelei.

And thanks for having us.

I'm going to go through pretty quickly.

I know we're short on time, but I do want to give a little bit of background.

I know most of you are familiar with the project.

We are currently at the 30% milestone as shown with the The star there, 2015 through 2018, we went through planning.

We went through a very robust process of outreach developing alternatives and coming up with our selected alternative that we then moved into 10% design in 2018. And we came to you in July of 2018 and gave you a briefing on that.

And then we advanced that to 30%.

Just a reminder on the proviso, you have it, but the key, kind of the key points, you know, we wanna come and give you an update on 30% design.

We also wanna really provide update on the pedestrian and bike facilities specifically, and really hit on some of the feedback that we've been getting from the community and how we're incorporating that into the design as we go.

Since we met last July, we have conducted robust outreach based on the feedback we're getting.

Open house late last year, very well attended.

Along with that open house, we had an online survey.

We got, I don't know, 100, 150 comments on that, a lot of good feedback on that.

We've been meeting with the advisory boards, local events, mass mailings, email updates, some media work.

So we've been doing a lot of outreach based on that 10% to inform our 30%.

This is just an overview of the project area.

Kind of a reminder again, this is, you know, the overall H Line Project is basically replacing the 120, taking that 120 and branding it as Rapid Ride.

King County, our partners who are here today, thanks for coming, Jerry and Lauren.

But anything outside of the blue and red area, so anything north of West Seattle Bridge and south of Barton there, that's delivered by King County Metro, and we're supporting them in the city of Seattle.

Anything in that blue box, that's SDOT Transit Plus Multimodal.

We're delivering that with King County as supporting partners.

They're a funding partner as well as a design partner on that.

And then we're also, the red box, we're delivering a paving as part of the project.

We'll get into a little bit more detail there, but there is a large AAC project at the north end of the corridor.

So just a reminder, existing conditions, this is a principal arterial.

It's about four miles.

There are sidewalks on the corridor.

There are bike facilities.

It's a mix of parking, restricted, unrestricted.

It's a very busy street.

We all know that.

And the 120 is a very busy bus line.

Next slide.

Now I'm going to get into the 30% design.

I encourage you to look at the map because this gets into a lot more detail as we go.

For transit, this is primarily a transit project.

We're looking to improve speed and reliability.

It's not just bus stops.

It's not just the branding.

We're also implementing a mile and a half of 24-7 bus lanes, about 1.2 miles of peak-only bus lanes, 13 station pairs in the city of Seattle, And those are station updates.

It's not just the, you know, the furnishings.

We're also bulbing in a lot of cases and adding other amenities at those locations.

And then we're also doing a lot of signal upgrades.

So transit signal priority.

We're implementing two queue jumps to try to get those buses moving quickly through the corridor and reliably.

Some of the bicycle facilities.

Queue jump, which is basically at a signal, you know, the bus can jump the rest of the queue.

They kind of get an advanced signal so that they can get ahead of the group at an intersection.

Just a way to keep them moving quickly.

Some of the bike infrastructure.

The alternative that we came down on is to have a southbound protected bike lane between Juneau and Cambridge.

That's showing there in orange.

And then utilizing the greenways that run parallel to the corridor to get riders north of Juneau and north on kind of Pigeon Point.

We simply don't have the room to put in protected bike lanes throughout the corridor if we're putting in the transit lanes and if we're retaining some of the parking there.

So along with that southbound protected bike lane, which is about two miles, we're also doing some improvements to those greenways to make sure that the greenways are functional and also making sure that they're connected to the corridor so that folks using the greenways can easily access the corridor.

And you see some of those connections, Hudson Street, Finley, Juneau, which is already completed.

And then a connection improvement down at Cambridge.

Some of the pedestrian facilities, so we're in addition to the station stops, we're also creating a lot of east-west connections across Delridge, especially where we're putting in stations.

Three rapid flashing beacons.

We're updating ADA facilities at 21 intersections.

We're doing signal upgrades at many of the intersections as well.

Paving, I mentioned that.

That's about 10 lane miles of paving that we're installing.

It's a mix of reconstruction and overlay.

There's also some stormwater drainage facility infrastructure that goes along with that.

I'll talk about that in just a sec.

Lorelei alluded to it in the introduction.

There is some parking impacts that I'll talk about as well as we go.

And then the utilities.

So we are partnering with SPU and Seattle City Light.

There are some locations where we're installing some new water main and some new sewer main.

We're also putting in some pedestrian lighting at the south end of the corridor.

I think I'm going to skip the cross sections for In interest of time, let me know if you have specific questions on those.

I want to spend a little bit of time on the community engagement.

There's kind of a lot of information here, but I want to touch on some of the big picture things that we heard from the community and how we're addressing them.

We heard, as I mentioned, we've heard a lot more than this.

We've kind of compiled some of the main themes that we've heard.

But one of the top ones, we've heard that this corridor needs paving, loud and clear.

So we added that.

We reallocated AAC funds to add paving to the project, which is really important for folks.

Along with that, we're also adding a planted median at the north end of the project.

get that kind of boulevard feel at the corridor.

So it's a beautification effort, but it's also a safety effort as well to keep drivers from using that center turn lane as a passing lane.

We're extending the bike lane to Juneau.

We already incorporated that in our 30% design.

That was very important to the bike community.

And we were able to do that.

The modifications to the 17th Avenue Southwest Greenway, we've heard a lot of input on that and we've been working with Dawn and some of the Greenway groups to make sure that we're incorporating the appropriate level of facility there so that people feel comfortable using that as a northbound route.

One of the big ones was that staircase.

It's showing here between Webster and Myrtle on 17th Avenue.

We're creating an alternative route so that folks don't have to use that stairway on 18th.

Clearing out some sight lines, putting in some speed humps and signage.

And then the other piece was looking at 16th, looking at improving that street.

It's an arterial, but making sure that folks that are confident riders can use that and get through a lot quicker so that they don't have to take this sort of meander between Webster and Canyon on 15th.

We heard a lot of feedback on that.

We're still keeping that 15th Avenue Greenway, you know, for all ages and all abilities.

but we can add some bike lanes on 16th to get people through.

We added some crossings.

I think I mentioned some of the Greenway connections, one of which is at Juneau.

We've already completed that.

Hudson-Finley-Graham, we've included that in design.

A lot of feedback that we get from folks is around where the stations are located.

Generally, that alignment is set.

We've done a lot of outreach and a lot of discussions about where those need to go, what the stop spacing needs to be, and we've been working really closely with our partners, King County Metro, on that to make sure that the spacing is around a third of a mile or less.

There was one specific request that I wanted to highlight, and that was moving the station from Finley to Brandon, which is kind of towards the north end.

I know Brandon is a neighborhood destination.

It's a real central point.

A lot of people wanted to see a station stop there.

We're going to be evaluating that going into 60%, but there are concerns about extending the length between between stops to beyond a third of a mile.

So that's something that we're still evaluating, but generally our approach is to keep those station stops where they are moving forward.

Mr. Chair, I apologize.

I've got a hard stop at 4 o'clock in order to make it to a 4.30 speaking engagement.

However, I know you're in very good hands with the author of the proviso sitting directly to my right.

Excellent.

I apologize for going a little over.

I want to just say I really appreciate that you have identified items that are going to be received further evaluation between now and the 60% design period.

I think that's really important.

I understand you're juggling a lot of different priorities for different members of the community and appreciate sort of putting a pin on this station move.

recognizing that a lot of the concerns that we heard early on in the project were related to the distance between stations, and frankly just concerned that this was going to The focus on the speed of the corridor was going to be more focused on serving people trying to get off the peninsula than the way the workhorse that is the 120, the 10th most used route for Metro is currently functioning, which is also a lot of intra-peninsula transportation.

So I appreciate that this is going to look at future analysis.

Also just want to call out a thanks for, pretty random, we received a constituent request, constituent who's not plugged, was unaware of this project, not plugged in as a stakeholder.

But just advocating really strongly for a crosswalk on Hudson, and we were able to tell him that there was one planned.

So that's always nice when those little bits of serendipity happen.

So thank you for the work that you've done thus far.

Absolutely.

Should I keep going?

Okay.

One other request that we're getting from folks and we're taking a very close look at is extending the bus-only lanes to the northbound bus-only lane south of Alaska.

There are backups there today that go well south of Alaska.

We've observed them.

We've been taking some data on that.

The trade-off, of course, is loss of parking.

So as you see, a lot of these comments that are remaining, a lot of those are around parking.

So it's a balance between getting that additional bus-only lane in versus keeping parking and what that would bring in terms of savings on the bus service.

Hence, looking at maybe night and weekend parking at Youngstown if you decided that you needed to make that trade-off?

Sure, sure.

So that would be an option as well.

Maybe not go 24-7, maybe it's peak only.

So we'll be evaluating those options and looking at some of the data a little bit closer going into 60%.

The delays are morning rush hour, is that?

It's morning, yeah, morning peak, yep.

We have looked at, Louisa Boren asked us to evaluate design in the location of the school, because there's a lot of parent drop-off and pickup.

We were able to modify the alignment to accommodate some additional parking in that area, so that was, we see that as a win.

Didn't sacrifice anything in terms of the the lane channelization, we just had to kind of change some things around.

So in some cases, we are able to accommodate folks on specific requests like that.

In some cases, we aren't.

So one example, you know, at the south end, there are some parking impacts where we're putting that peak only bus lane.

It's simply too narrow to accommodate additional parking.

We are keeping the parking on the east side of the street.

But on the west side of the street where we're putting in that southbound protected bike lane, we have the peak only bus lanes.

There's simply not room.

We will be doing a parking evaluation, looking at some of the off Delridge parking on side streets, and really getting a handle on what the parking situation is at the south end.

We know that's very important.

There's a lot of multifamily housing in that location.

So we'll be continuing to look at that as we go.

And then there was a request to look at kind of the south of Henderson between Roxbury and Henderson, looking at some traffic calming elements to get those bikers just a little bit further south into the white center neighborhood.

And we'll be looking at that as well, going into 60%.

I appreciate that you conveyed the pressures around parking, which we hear a lot.

And I just want to emphasize that for me, when we have a bus route that's one of the most utilized in the system, that when we look at trade-offs, a balance is important.

But I certainly skew in favor of, let's not have the people that are taking the bus be held up if we don't have to.

Okay, I do want to say a word about the stormwater code compliance, because as Lorelei mentioned, that was a large challenge going into 30%.

So when we came to a 10%, that paving design hadn't been developed very far.

So we took it to a 30% design level, and we quickly found that stormwater on Delridge Way was extremely expensive and put us way over budget and it also impacted our schedule.

We want to have this wrapped up by the end of 2021 to overlap with King County Metro's H line service opening date.

So we took a step back and we kind of looked at our different alternatives.

We did a kind of a mini VE study to try to look at alternatives to get that stormwater system where it needed to be in terms of budget and schedule.

We think we found a solution to get the stormwater on side streets and additionally work with the SPU to try to get an alternative compliance agreement in place where we're paying them kind of a fee in lieu based on the design.

they take that money and invest it in a project on Longfellow Creek that might make more sense for the overall basin.

So we're working very closely with SPU to try to work towards that.

We still have a lot of work to do on the design of the side street option, but we think it's very promising.

SPU is working very closely with us and they think it is as well.

But we do have some work between 30 and 60 to get there and get that agreement ironed out.

And is SPU in the decision-making role about this alternative compliment agreement?

assuming that you continue working towards that design for that other project?

Are they the deciders?

Essentially, it's a negotiation, but I would say SPU holds the keys to allowing a fee-in-lieu to take place, meaning they have a project and a plan to be able to use it.

So what SDOT is committed to do is fulfill the actual code compliance, which we can do on the side streets, but if there's a better investment for the city as a whole than SPU would say, yes, we can do a fee in lieu.

So the compliance that you're referring to is code compliance, not SPU's consent decree compliance.

Exactly.

Yes.

City stormwater code compliance.

And we're designing it in such a way that we can build it, keep on budget, keep on schedule, if we don't move forward with SPU on an alternative code compliance agreement.

But that would be our preference.

I also do want to mention that we're working with Sound Transit at the north end.

We know that there's a link light rail station coming as part of ST3 between Genesee and West Seattle Bridge.

There's alternatives.

They're fairly early in the process, but we know that there could potentially be impacts to that area.

And we want to make sure that we're not going too far down the road with the infrastructure work, knowing that when Sound Transit comes through, they're going to tear it out.

So we're coordinating with Sound Transit, making sure that we're intelligent about the design there, make sure that we're, you know, coordinated with them and not going too far with that design.

And do you feel that those are decisions that will be able to be made before the 60% design?

Yes, I do.

And we've already, CJ made the decision to limit the paving scope because we're certain that if they move forward with that approach, it would affect the paving.

So we automatically already know that that's a piece that we've limited because of the...

You already have limited the paving scope.

Yes, for that overlap piece.

And when you say limit the paving scope, you just mean...

the number of paving miles that you're doing in that area, or what do you mean by that?

It's instead of full reconstruction, we're going to be doing mill and overlay with spot panel replacement.

So it's more of a 10-year fix instead of a 40-year fix, knowing that there's a possibility that we need to come back when Sound Transit comes in and do a little additional work there.

Again, what is the distance that you're talking about doing this?

It's between Genesee and West Seattle Bridge.

It's probably half a mile.

Right.

We've been working very closely with Metro to develop a project specific partnership.

It's really critical with both H line capital elements integrated into this Delridge capital project as well as to the overall success of the H line project, which benefits parts of Seattle even beyond Delridge itself.

We're currently negotiating an agreement that we expect to have finalized at the 60% milestone for their funding contribution.

King County's budget includes funding for the H line, so we feel very confident about having a contribution.

It won't be exactly 15 million, it might actually be less, but it'll be based on actuals and cost sharing for the project.

We are working, moving forward to having an integrated outreach plan this spring for our next round of design.

That really speaks to trying to talk about both SDOT's and King County's investments in this corridor.

And in the interest of time, King County has offered to send council members an email with a more detailed update on the H line itself throughout the corridor if that's of interest.

I would appreciate that.

opening date specifically, or?

No, the opening date is still fall 2021. And as CJ said, we're working very hard to make sure our construction timeline helps support that opening date.

More just updates about their process for moving forward, especially with scope updates in the Westwood Village that we're not covering here tonight.

And so how does the stormwater upgrades taking until 2022 impact that 2021 opening?

So one of the main reasons of pulling that stormwater work off of Delridge is that that saves our schedule, essentially.

It brings us back to the 2021 date.

So with stormwater on Delridge, we would be in 2022.

A non-alternate.

Yes.

Got it.

Exactly.

The slide that we have.

previously and what's on there is slightly different.

So, there's a bullet point on the slide in front of me that just says construction delays could push things into 2022. But what you're showing there doesn't say that.

I'm not sure what you're looking at, Council Member Herbold, but it may be based on the one I'm looking at, too.

So, we can look at that.

So, overall, at cost estimate, we're at about Just a little over $30 million for the transit multimodal improvements.

Paving is a little under $30 million.

Stormwater, we have a range there because we're still working on that number.

But we put it in the $10 to $12 million range, which puts us right around $70 million for the overall project.

Our funding, $72.3 million.

And big caveat on King County Metro, as Maria alluded to, we're still working on the agreement, on the funding agreement for that.

So subject to change.

So next steps, we're working on 60% design development, June of 2019. We're also doing, as part of that, we're doing a very large outreach push to get back out and really get some additional feedback and provide an update on where we're at.

We're working with SPU on the alternative compliance agreement that I mentioned.

We're working with King County Metro on trying to finalize our agreement by that 60% deliverable as well.

So busy spring for us.

Looking to finalize design by the end of 2019 and then begin construction in 2020, spring, early summer of 2020. Wrap up construction by the end of 2021. Get the service running.

I've got a note here that your July 2018 presentation noted a grant requirement to get to 90% design by June 2019. Is that still a requirement?

Was that when we were still pursuing small starts?

No, that's a regional mobility grant.

I believe that we need to look at that.

Yeah, we're proceeding and we need to work with the state on updating some of the commitments as part of that grant.

But we, at this point, continue to utilize that grant for design work.

That's all we had.

Any other questions?

I don't have on the project.

I was going to maybe turn to you, Calvin, and see if you want to just give me the proviso

Well with the legislation legislation in front of you lives a proviso that restricted 2018 spending Until this presentation until council received this information and had to pass this legislations in front of you today Okay, so it's a pretty straightforward budget lift great.

Oh And Council Member Herbold, I'm going to defer to you if you want to speak to it.

I see you're handing out, looks like maybe an amendment to this.

I do have an amendment.

Great.

And so this amendment basically states that before appropriating funds for construction in the 2020 budget, it's the Council's intent to review the project to ensure the final scope and design reflect So we have a lot of community engagement and input in the project development.

Rather than aligning this proviso with a percent design stage, we've aligned it with the budget process so that there would be no inadvertent delays busy committee agendas.

So hopefully that works well with your schedule.

It's consistent with, I think, our ongoing interest in oversight.

This is a watch list project on the council watch list that was adopted on Monday.

Further, I think the background on this is just recognizing that stage-based appropriation.

We want to make sure that we recognize that reliance on those without understanding your schedule and your pressures and the impact that delays have on both of those things and funding that they can carry the risk of delaying a project.

So we're trying to, again, find that middle ground.

Yeah.

Council Member Herbold, I want to thank you for this approach because I think for us it lines up with a natural, you know, the budget process as well as a natural whole point for us to make sure we're ready to go to construction.

Thank you.

I will share my appreciation on that one.

Shall we go ahead and why don't I go ahead and move the bill and then we'll consider the amendment so I'll go ahead and Move council bill one one nine four three four And now why don't we consider your amendment?

May I move the new section two as follows.

Section two, before appropriating funds for construction of the Delridge Multimodal Corridor project in the 2020 budget, it's the council's intent to review the project to ensure that the final scope and design reflect continued community engagement and input in the project development.

Excellent, I will second that.

All in favor of the amendment, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Great, so now we have an amended council bill in front of us.

Alvin, anything else we need to do on that before we do approval?

We'll just pass that.

Great.

I'll go ahead and call for a vote on that.

All in favor of passing Council Bill 119-434 as amended, signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Great.

So thank you all for your work on this.

Heard a lot of some really nice comments from the public today in your outreach.

It's great to hear.

When things go wrong, we tend to focus on that.

And it seems like there's been a lot of really great work done in this community.

And I know there's a lot of desire to get this right for a whole host of reasons.

And so I want to just applaud you for doing some good outreach work.

And we'll be checking in again as we move forward.

Yeah, I wasn't at the table, but I was listening at my desk and really appreciate that on behalf of my constituents.

I do want to flag before we close this.

I think there was a slide that we didn't get to regarding the bicycle design details and Dawn has left, but I just want to make a plug for their additional recommendations around the 26th Avenue Greenway and request that you consider those seriously as the design work continues.

Thanks.

Right?

If there's nothing else, we'll be adjourned.

Thank you all.

Thank you very much.