Bike Weekends, Ballard Marches, and Crisis Care

The Urbanist newsroom discusses the April headlines, including Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announcing a greatly expanded Bicycle Weekend schedule on Lake Washington Boulevard, hundreds of transit advocates marching to save Ballard light rail from the chopping block, and behind-the-scenes pushback against a Capitol Hill crisis case center from prominent landlords and business owners.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan: Welcome to the Urbanist Podcast, a show touching on the biggest headlines at the urbanist, and offering a deeper look from the reporters who are breaking the stories. As an independent reader supported publication, The Urbanist has been covering the Seattle metropolitan region since 2014. We do advocacy journalism for better cities. 

You can find us at theurbanist.org. I'm Ryan Packer, contributing editor here at the Urbanist, and we are coming to you with our entire newsroom. We've got a Doug Trumm publisher 

[00:00:40] Doug: Great to be here. 

[00:00:42] Ryan: And reporter on public safety issues. Amy Sundburg. 

[00:00:45] Amy: Hello, hello. 

[00:00:47] Ryan: We've got a jam packed episode for you. The news is happening all over the region and we've been really busy trying to keep up. There's a lot of stories happening from transportation, public safety, and everything in between. 

So, we'll dive right in. 

First we're gonna start with a very positive story. I'd say the biggest transportation announcement we've gotten from Katie Wilson, new Seattle Mayor so far during her four month term. It's regarding Bicycle Weekends, which is an annual open street festival, down on Lake Washington Boulevard, between Mount Baker and Seward Park. And Katie Wilson is taking that program that was kind of stifled under her predecessor Bruce Harrell's term and scaling it back up. We're gonna get bicycle weekend every single weekend, apart from Seafair, between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year, it's pretty big. Friday nights are coming back. Sunday nights are coming back. 

You can enjoy an open street without cars, on your bike. Rolling, strolling, walking, just enjoying the seashore without car noise for three sunsets a weekend, which is gonna be huge. 

[00:02:03] Doug: Yeah, for sure. She really dropped the urbanist joy hammer on everyone. 

[00:02:07] Amy: It's so gorgeous there too. Like I have to say, it's one of my favorite places to, I'm not a cyclist, but, but I'm a big walker and it's one of my favorite places to walk in the city. 

[00:02:17] Ryan: It is. Yeah. Jenny Durkan, uh, say what you will about her tenure as mayor did kind of start this trend of closing it down for extended periods during the pandemic. I got really used to that. There was even, I think a couple of like Thanksgiving and Christmas closures. 2021. 

Bruce Harrell was elected in 2021. But Bruce Harrell scaled it back to 10 weekends without Friday night, without Sunday night. So I didn't get down there very much because by the time I realized that it was happening and remembered it was bicycle weekend, it was either Sunday at four and I wasn't gonna get over there or thought about going on Friday, and I'm like, oh, it doesn't open till tomorrow. So it's gonna be huge. 

[00:02:58] Doug: Yeah, I think people, their schedules get crazy in the summer, and the idea that you are gonna figure out the one out of two or three weekends that were available for these brief 36 hours in the Harrell scheme, it was tough. And you know, the spontaneity of, 'Hey, it's a nice evening, I just want to go walk or bike or stroll,' on, on the waterfront there without there being like drag racing or some road rage incident happening is huge. 

It's a big deal and it's actually a pretty good thoroughfare, given the lack of options in Southeast Seattle to make your way to other parts of the city and connect with the Mountain to Sound Trail and other facilities. And now it goes to a light rail station too. 

[00:03:41] Ryan: That's true. Pretty easy connection between Judkins Park Station at I 90 go through the bike tunnel down through Coleman Park, which is not part of the closure, but it's really low traffic and one of the most fun bike rides in the city is heading down that, it's like Interlaken Park, it's almost like on a hot day, it's like jumping in a cool bath when you head down that, that hill that winds down. And then you're pretty much right there. 

[00:04:09] Doug: Yeah, it's one of those miraculous things. We had one of the world famous landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, designed this beautiful facility and now there's been over a century for all these trees to mature and now we have this iconic, beautiful pathway along the lake, and it wasn't designed for drag racing. It was designed for people to stroll and roll through there. 

[00:04:32] Ryan: Yeah. And we did a lot of reporting during the Harrell years on what was happening with Lake Washington Boulevard, which coincidentally is, you know, Bruce Harrell's front door. There was a contingent of people who don't want to see that street get closed to motor vehicle traffic. 

And they seem to have the ear of the Mayor's office during those years. We reported on some emails, after parks initially released a more broad bicycle weekend schedule, quickly walked it back, claiming it was a mistake, and we confirmed that that was just a clear walk back, after the mayor's office said that they had a brokered understanding of a kind of a truce. The multimodal advocates were totally left outta the loop on, by the way. 

It was just between driving advocates in the mayor's office. So, that's certainly a contingent of people who is not super happy right now. But ultimately elections have consequences and I think Katie Wilson was pretty clear about the direction that she wants to see the city move in. And this is, I think, only the beginning, to say nothing of the fact that I'm expecting her office to have a broader vision about the permanent future for this street. 

[00:05:41] Doug: Yeah, that is a good point. And I think that's really a minority of folks who, who largely live near the street who want it for driving and most of the city wants to go down there to enjoy it as a park space. And there is a proposal on the table that would pedestrianize it permanently. These have been generated by, by advocacy groups, but... 

[00:05:59] Ryan: Yeah, there's a couple of different options you could do. You could certainly pedestrianize whole swaths that don't have any driveways. But you could also maybe make it a one way, turn half of the street into a walking, biking path on the water side. There's lots of different things to do. 

That walking path was the vision for the street from Tammy Morales, who was the council member for that district for a while. She put some money in the budget to advance that, and then it was kind of swiped ultimately for traffic calming. But even that didn't even get across the finish line without getting watered down and pulled back because of concerns around driving access. 

[00:06:36] Doug: Yeah, and there's a clear equity argument for it too with, we see Green Lake got this treatment with Aurora where they put a concrete median down and now it's a really safe environment to walk and bike on the side of that road, even though it's a dangerous highway. You know, they should be able to do that in Southeast Seattle too. 

[00:06:52] Ryan: Yeah, so that starts on Memorial Day, 7:00 PM Friday nights until around early in the morning on Monday. So, it'll be an incredible way to spend the summer and I'm sure we'll get some rainy weekends in there, too. And so we aren't putting all our eggs in one basket, which always happens when you have just 10 weekends. 

So, I'm sure we all go to town in the summer, so plenty of time for everyone to enjoy it. We're all, I think, pretty buoyed by that news out of the mayor's office this week. Amy, you also had some good news come up this week that you reported outta the city attorney's office. Can you tell us about that? 

[00:07:28] Amy: Yeah, so the Seattle City Attorney's Office announced that they are now going to devote a full-time attorney to looking into matters regarding wage theft. In the past, that was a kind of a part-time job for an attorney that was also doing other things, which is hard to imagine. But now we're gonna have a full-time dedicated attorney who's gonna be working with the Office of Labor Standards, giving them legal advice and helping them build these cases. 

You know, and we don't hear a ton about wage theft in the news, but that is not because it's not common. It is extremely common. It is just uncommon for it to be prosecuted or stopped. 

[00:08:11] Ryan: And so the city has its Office of Labor standards. Have you been able to uncover how this position will interact with that office or? 

[00:08:20] Amy: I mean, I think they will be constantly in communication with one another. I think they'll be working hand in hand. That is definitely the impression I got. Yeah. You know, I, I will say when I read this news, I was like, well, this is amazing, but also, like, this should have happened a long time ago and maybe we should have more than one. But I do feel like seeing a positive step in the right direction, it is a great way to begin. 

[00:08:46] Ryan: Yeah, because like the city attorney's office has, you know, dedicated attorneys for Office of Housing, for example, that was Eddie Lin's job for a while. So it's kind of wild that they didn't have a dedicated person for OLS. 

[00:09:00] Amy: Yeah. Well, I think it shows the priorities of the office, right? And how they are shifting, with the new city attorney, Erika Evans. 

[00:09:08] Ryan: Absolutely. 

[00:09:10] Doug: Yeah, she has different priorities than the Republican, it turns out. 

[00:09:15] Amy: We're all very surprised. But I mean, that is something that I spoke with her about when she was on the campaign trail, and so I am pleased to see that she's making good that promise. 

[00:09:26] Doug: Yeah. And elections have consequences, as we often talk about. It seems like a whole slate of candidates that are looking to do things differently. When we saw this progressive wave coming in 2025 and it's hopefully just the tip of the iceberg. Another thing people were really hoping for from the City Attorney's Office was a little bit more willingness to take on risk and defend the city when it comes to growth planning and the Comprehensive Plan process because that was a huge impediment last year under Ann Davison, a more conservative attorney, you know, that didn't want the city to get sued even though the City is sued every time it does any major land use change or zoning change. 

But that was very limiting to what they actually were able to do last year with adding more neighborhood centers after Mayor Harrell's cuts. So that'd be another thing to watch. Like they're still gonna make the city do a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, which is gonna delay it by potentially a year. 

But, once it's actually on the table, I don't think we're gonna see so much clenching and fear, hopefully the City Attorney's ready to go to bat for that. So that's another big thing where people are like, what does the city attorney do? Like, they have all these subtle impacts that come out eventually. 

[00:10:34] Amy: Yeah, it's actually a much more important office than I think it gets credit for.  

[00:10:40] Ryan: In other positive signs, we've got news out of Tacoma, what's happening over in Grit City, Doug. 

[00:10:50] Doug: Yeah, we had this story on Friday, which I was very excited to see. Last week, Tacoma voted to put a transportation levy on the ballot, and they were solely in need of one because their last transportation levy, which is just called Tacoma Streets Initiative, expired last year. So this year they're down 20% of their transportation funding. 

And Tacoma's already a city with some pretty big needs. Not only are you just talking about basic maintenance, potholes everywhere, but also a very fledgling Vision Zero program in a city with a lot of traffic fatalities. You know, they need to get some momentum going there. 

They're doing a few nice safety projects through the last levy, but now they don't have that funding anymore. So on Tuesday of last week, the Tacoma City Council voted to put another levy on the ballot. Last year they ran a bigger one that was like $400 million, and I think it was a longer time span. 

It was like indefinite time span, auto-renewing, I think, or something like that. And this one is a little smaller after that one failed in a pretty close vote in April of last year. So this new one's $200 million in taxpayer funding, but they're saying, well then leverage an additional 120 million. 

So it's a $320 million package overall, over 10 years. So about $32 million a year, and that is pretty significant investment still, even though in a smaller size that will, and they're saying they're gonna be much more strategic than the last one. And actually making sure each project they go and they can try to have safety elements, not just repave the streets. 

It's pretty good news. I hope it passes. It was close last time, so hopefully being a little bit more specific and not having the open-endedness, and a little better marketing and communications. They're optimistic that it can pass, but it'll be on the August ballot for Tacoma voters. 

[00:12:30] Ryan: When you said it, it was close last time. You're saying that it was on the ballot before and it failed. 

[00:12:36] Doug: Yeah, exactly. It was called Tacoma Streets Initiative II and was on a special election ballot in April. And, I don't know if that's another calculation, they didn't specifically say that, but... the good thing about a special election is it's a smaller electorate, and that's also the bad thing. 

If you get a backlash, you know, that's more powerful turnout than the progressive turnout that's wanting to fund that infrastructure. It seems like that's what happened and now we're expecting much bigger turnout. It's a midterm year and, and there's a president that a lot of people are frustrated with in the Whitehouse. So, it's gonna be a lot bigger turnout than an April special election. And, I think that's overall good, even if we don't know which way it swings. It's just a more representative sample. 

[00:13:20] Amy: That makes a lot of sense. I always am in favor of having more people voting and any changes that makes that more possible as well. 

[00:13:28] Doug: Yeah, Pierce County struggles with turnout too. It's a lot lower turnout than, than many parts of King County and other counties throughout the state. Maybe that pre presidential year will help overcome that. But yeah, that's been a point of frustration I think for many years. 

[00:13:43] Ryan: Yeah. How that does on the August ballot's gonna be a big indicator of whether there's appetite in Pierce County for funding transit as well. Pierce Transit is also looking at going on the ballot. I think they'll probably have to make up their decision before they see the results of that August primary. 

But, it's still gonna be a big bellwether. Pierce County hasn't gone to the voters for transit funding in decades. And so they're badly in need of more bus service as well. So we'll see how this portends that broader vote that could happen in November. 

[00:14:16] Doug: Yeah. That would be huge. They're the regional transit with the poorest funding, like you said, and that, that really means they have less frequency there. So yeah, it would be great if this could just springboard into a wave of transportation improvements in Tacoma and Pierce County. 

But definitely check out Carolyn Bick's story. Our Pierce County correspondent who wrote about this. They had some study sessions that sort of laid out what the city was thinking for investments and there's this whole financial plan. And, and that was one of the frustrations with the last one that didn't pass was that, did they do a good enough job of communicating and, and being clear about what it would fund? 

And sometimes that's just like, that's every opposition campaign ever. But, you know, this time they're really trying to insulate themselves from that. 

[00:14:57] Ryan: Yeah. Well, good luck, Tacoma. It's badly needed investments. Speaking of traffic safety and funding. We got some interesting news outta Seattle this week. Council member Rob Saka, chair of the Transportation Committee is calling for an performance audit of the Vision Zero Program, which is the team within the Seattle Department of Transportation that is trying to achieve Seattle's goal of eliminating serious injuries and fatalities in traffic by 2030. 

He made that announcement on the eve of a discussion of Vision Zero at the council where SDOT announced that they had revised last year's traffic fatality numbers up to 27 deaths, which is pretty consistent with past years. The big, big headline was the number of people walking on Seattle streets that were killed last year at 18, which is just a big one year jump, compared to the previous year. And remains much higher than the levels we saw before the pandemic. 

While, while I think that the headlines are a little over indexing on the one year number, and looking at the broader trends is more important to me, I still think it's pretty clear that we're not doing enough to address these issues, whether a performance audit of SDOT is gonna be the way to get at the root of that is much less clear. You know, a couple years ago we already had a top to bottom review of the Vision Zero program under SDOT Director Greg Spotts. 

[00:16:29] Doug: Yeah, I was gonna say it's a little bit of deja vu here. 

[00:16:31] Ryan: It is, you know, this is a third party audit, so maybe they'll let us know some things that the department wasn't quite comfortable talking about. But, the auditor's only gonna be able to be at a high level. So, as many people pointed out, during public comment yesterday, during the council meeting, including Gordon Padelford, who's the head of the Streets Alliance, formerly Seattle Neighborhood Greenways: we know what streets are dangerous. We know what it would take to fix them. Multi-lane arterials, like Fourth Ave South, Rainier Avenue, Lake City Way. That's where people are getting injured and killed. And so we don't really need an audit to tell us what we could be doing. 

[00:17:13] Amy: Yeah, I was gonna say it's more a question of prioritization and money was my impression. Which unfortunately, an audit won't do much for. 

[00:17:22] Ryan: Yeah. Well, and money is interesting because I find it a little perplexing to me that Rob Saka is calling for the audit while at the same time he's touting that city council's commitment to this issue by looking at the sheer amount of money that was in the transportation levy for transportation safety. 

And find those two things to be kind of in conflict with one another. We can definitely spend money. We are really good at spending money in Seattle, so that's not really a problem. But the question is what we're spending the money on, and if the improvements are getting watered down through community opposition or even, you know, political meddling, not directly accusing Saka of that in any recent projects.  

[00:18:03] Doug: It's hard not to bring up Curby in this conversation. Uh, I mean, it's maybe just becoming too much of a thing, but Councilmember Saka keeps bringing it in. Where, you know, this is a project for those who haven't been following all the memes and whatnot, and the political cartoons from Brett Hamill, but, Curby is a little nickname for this median that they put on Delridge Way, that was to improve safety so people don't take wild left turns across the sidewalk, right by I think it's like a daycare or a community center or something like that. 

And, the problem is that Councilmember Saka uses that facility with his kids, so he wants to make that left turn, too, and so does many of his friends in that facility, who are doing the same commute with their kids. You have to end up taking a U-turn instead, I guess if you're trying to get there from that direction. 

But he wanted to get rid of that, and it was this $2 million line item in a budget, that was erasing the safety work. And even if you're sympathetic to the folks who have a little bit harder car commute to that facility, it's like, well, can we ever build something and just be done with it? Or does I always have to be, the Seattle process continues even after something is built. And it's really the Seattle process that's driving up the cost of many projects across the city and just making it so they're watered down and they're not having the safety impact they could have. Aurora comes to mind like, you know, we know how to fix Aurora. 

But we just can't envision starting that construction of that project anytime in the immediate future. It has to be like five years of planning or something, apparently. And, you know, we missed state funding because we weren't really willing to plan it quick enough. And that state funding cycle now is what Ryan, like another five years for something like that. 

[00:19:42] Ryan: If that, so, you know, Doug, to your earlier point, you know, I think to be a little fairer to Saka, if I can believe myself saying that, I don't think his kids go to the school anymore. And I think he did see himself as helping out a community that is primarily refugees attend that school. 

It's interesting because I think we clearly see Saka is taking a step back from trying to get involved in these projects. Like he clearly saw that that didn't go well for him, and saw the backlash. And so he's clearly trying to take a step back and say I'm not involved in these projects. 

Like, it doesn't go well. And that's kind of a positive step, I think, to recognize that the people who know how to keep our streets safe should be left to cook. And so I like that. But like I said, it's just kind of weird to me just to be like, we're spending a billion dollars on safety. 

Okay, well what are we getting for that? And I'm a little disappointed in SDOT actually, you know, and we spend a lot of our time defending projects from opponents, but Alexis Rinck asked Venu Nemani, who's the chief traffic safety officer at SDOT, how do we gauge the effectiveness of our projects? Like how are we looking back and seeing what worked and what didn't? 

And his two examples were from 2018 and 2020, and it's 2026. Now we're in a totally different levy. It's just wild to me that if you go on SDOT's website, they used to have this whole list of before and after studies showing what happened on different streets and the improvement. 

And you could literally see the data and we just don't do that anymore. And it's disappointing and frustrating, especially for advocates because we can't really even defend sometimes what happens. We don't have the data. 

[00:21:32] Amy: Yeah, I think that having clear metrics that show the value of a project is so useful not only for defending that project, but for defending future projects that might be similar. I hear so much discourse these days about blue cities showing that they can govern. And I think one of the ways to show you can govern is by being able to demonstrate what you're doing, how you're spending the money, and then the good results that are coming from that.  

It's also the way to sell the next levy, right? If people can see how this is making their lives better, or their community's lives better, they're much more likely to support spending more money to get the job done. 

[00:22:18] Ryan: Yeah, and we're at a weird point right now. You know, Saka is right: there's a lot of money going to safety. A lot of those projects are in design right now. They're in a black box. And so we don't know what some of these corridor projects, which are really gonna be the make or break for this levy, is whether we're able to really make a difference on Rainier Avenue, for example. South Jackson Street is a Vision Zero project that's advancing and really wanna see if that's actually gonna really make a measurable difference on, on that street. That doesn't really work great for anybody right now. But we're kind of waiting to see, and obviously we just had a new mayor take office. 

She found an interim SDOT director who has a long history in the department, definitely knows the ins and outs, is doing a lot of work to move things forward. But, it remains to be seen. The big question right now is whether SDOT is actually gonna realize that they have a mayor who will have their back when it comes to these safety projects that are not gonna be universally popular. They're just not. And so, we've seen some frustrating signs that there's internal reluctance to really taking that license and running with it. 

[00:23:36] Amy: I think it's always worthwhile to point out that in general people seem to be very concerned about traffic safety. So while an individual project might not be popular for various reasons, I think Seattleites as a whole seem to really care about traffic safety, and want to prioritize it. And I'm thinking about the Seattle University Public Safety Survey that they do every year. 

And you know, I always take that survey with a grain of salt. I think there are some issues with it, but what I have found interesting in the last couple years is that number one, public safety concern of the Seattleites that choose to fill out this survey is traffic safety number one above every other public safety concern. I think that's really telling. 

[00:24:26] Ryan: Yeah, that's a great point. It remains to be seen whether we're gonna be able to actually have an SDOT that is unleashed to go after our most infamous dangerous streets. Because I think we do have a mayor who will have their back. 

[00:24:40] Amy: Yeah, and I think the people want that too. So I hope they can really take heart in that knowledge. 

[00:24:45] Ryan: Mm-hmm. 

[00:24:47] Doug: Yeah. And you have to find that sweet spot where you want it to get a little bit of community buy-in, you want people excited about the changes happening in the street and seeing a way to communicate the results afterwards too. But it not being a crippling process of endless studies and just so much outreach that people get turned off. 

I think the spot improvements that SDOT is doing. Some of them are really exciting, but maybe they just don't get communicated as well. Like converting a bunch of flex post bike lanes to concrete bike lanes through the better bike lanes project. People's commutes get a lot safer, and the sidewalks near there get safer too. 

Sometimes these spot improvements... I can't help but think of my own street. Woodland Park Avenue recently got a bunch of these flex posts. It's a really wide street that used to be a street car, and they just added a bunch of flex posts to try to close the distance and you know, I was like cool, I didn't know this was coming even though I write about this for a living. But it's only on a few blocks and how do we connect the pieces to fill in the gaps on the map and communicate these projects? 'Cause it's cool that SDOT can just go out there and improve. And they added speed bumps too. But I think when we will really be in a good place is when all these facilities connect and they don't feel like one-offs. And there's just a higher standard throughout, across the board. 

[00:26:13] Ryan: In other City of Seattle news, we've been covering the long saga to build a crisis care center, which will be operated by King County, in Capitol Hill in Seattle, on Broadway in the Old Poly Clinic building. 

Amy, you did a lot of digging when it came to some public records around who was opposing this crisis care center. What did you find in your reporting? 

[00:26:38] Amy: Yeah. When the opposition was happening, this was last year, at the time I put in some public record requests to get a greater insight into what was going on behind the scenes. And what I found was that there was kind of a cadre of landlords, business owners in Capitol Hill who were opposed to the idea of this crisis care center. 

And, they started out reaching out to the County, because it's the County's project ultimately. And then when they weren't satisfied with that interaction, or those multiple interactions, I should say, they started reaching out to the mayor's office, which of course at that time was Bruce Harrell. 

They spent a lot of time reaching out to Natalie Walton Anderson, who was the head of public safety in the mayor's office, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and others. Really trying to, you know, push their agenda that they really did not want this crisis care center to be located in the old poly polyclinic building for a variety of reasons. It was actually really interesting to me because all of them said: 'we support the crisis care centers. We just don't want it here.' 

You have to put it somewhere. The reason, you know that that site was chosen and my understanding is not only was the old Poly clinic building already had zoning for medical uses and they'd be able to open the facility a lot quicker 'cause they wouldn't need as extensive renovations. But also because it is really in the heart of the city, right? It's in the middle, between north and south, between east and west, and it's a transportation hub so that people would be able to get there more easily. 

All of which we're seen as positives in selecting that site. But, I think the landlords and business owners in the area were expressing very strongly their public safety concerns around having the site located there. 

[00:28:39] Ryan: Yeah. And this is gonna be one of five and crisis care centers across the county. And citing these is proving to be pretty thorny. The only one that's open right now is in Kirkland, which was opened by a private operator and then taken over by the County, if I'm not mistaken, Amy. 

[00:28:58] Amy: They're buying the property. Yes. 

[00:29:01] Ryan: But then the one in South King County was rejected. There was a site that was eyed in Federal Way that was rejected by the Federal Way Council in early 2025 that they decided to take off the table. So, we're still waiting to see what happens with the South King County one. 

[00:29:17] Amy: Yeah, they're working on that this year. I think what was really interesting to me about this story was just kind of looking at who has a voice in what's going on because the crisis care levy was very popular, right? It won with a huge amount of support. And even more so specifically in Capitol Hill. I asked a friend of mine to do some work and break it down for me so that I would have a map, which is part of the article, showing where the support is. 

And, and, you know, the neighborhood of Capitol Hill was very excited about the Crisis Care Center idea. So it wasn't that it was widely unpopular. But what, what I saw was all of this email correspondence with this group of landlords, and how that impacted how the City responded. Of course, like I said, it wasn't their project, it's the county's project. 

But, Councilmember Hollingworth, who is the council member for D3, got very involved and had a list of things that she would wanna see to go forward with this site. And then when Bruce Harrell finally issued a letter of support, which was necessary for the project to go forward at that location, he had a whole bunch of caveats as well. 

And there's like an advisory council that now has to be part of things. And a lot of the members of that council are people who really opposed that site. So are gonna have a different lens, when talking about how that's going than, you know, lots of other people who maybe are utilizing the site themselves or have family members who need to utilize the site or are involved in social work of some kind. And, that perspective is less on the table. 

[00:30:59] Doug: Yeah. And I'm glad you were able to dig that story out, Amy, because it took a lot of sifting through emails, and you were making the most of an injury. I know you've talked about this on, on Blue Sky, but on. 

[00:31:09] Amy: Yeah. 

[00:31:11] Doug: For folks who don't know Amy fosters dogs sometimes and well, unfortunately one of them bit her in the finger, which is a terrible thing for a reporter. We need those for all our clicking and our typing. So you've made the most by sifting through these emails, and that story is the fruit of Amy's pain and labor there. 

[00:31:28] Amy: It is true because I could not type, but I could, I could sit and read. And so I spent a lot of time, during my, uh, I guess convalescence, reading a lot of emails for this story, reading a lot of reports for future reporting, like putting in requests, I could, that were short enough that I could do it via voice dictation. 

[00:31:49] Doug: And I think another really interesting connection you drew in the piece, Amy, is that many of the similar characters, you know, these big time real estate folks in Capitol Hill, or business owners of prominence in Capitol Hill are the same people who were pushing to block a bus lane on Union Street that was about to open. It was already made, and they were trying to get SDOT out to effectively tear it out, as far as the red paint in the ground and, I guess they were concerned about parking, and access to garages and things like that, that there are alternative routes. 

But, it's the same people. It's kind of this not my backyard mentality that since they've invested so much money in this neighborhood, that all decisions have to be what they don as good investment decisions. And there's plenty of research that did show that businesses don't always have the best instincts in that. 

Like a bike lane often is very good for business, or a bus lane, especially when it's as successful a bus lane as the G Line, is very good for business. But there's sort of this deep cynical attitude that all these city projects are doomed to fail. And I think that's kind of true of both of these projects. They didn't think they would get the customers back from the bus lanes. They didn't think the crisis center would work, so they only saw it as a negative thing. And I guess they're concerned about like, it attracting even more people with mental health crises or homeless people to the neighborhood. 

And you know, there's already a sizable population of those in Capitol Hill. Anyone can see that when they're walking around. So I don't know, like if, if not this crisis center, how do we fix this problem? If not this bus lane, how do you propose to get better transportation? Because not everyone can drive to your business in Capitol Hill. Capitol Hill's it's too dense for that. It's too many people, not everyone can drive. So I don't know, just very frustrating that some of these things are so hard for us. 

[00:33:30] Amy: Yeah, I mean, I think the crisis care centers, it's tough because. They're insufficient on their own. That is a true thing. Like you can't just put down these crisis care centers and expect everything to be fixed. Right. That is unrealistic. And you need a lot of other supportive things around that. 

You need more permanent supportive housing, for example. You need places people can go long term. You need more substance use disorder treatment options. The whole host of services that go along with that. And we don't have enough of any of that. But you have to start somewhere and you have to start offering these services, and then start building out the pipeline of all the services that people need and currently don't have access to. 

And I mean, the other thing is looking at these emails is a question of who has access to power, right? Who has the ear of elected officials, who has the time to do the advocacy, which is very time consuming. And you know, a lot of people, if they're, they're working a full-time job or maybe, you know, they have a couple jobs, they have some kids, like, they're not necessarily gonna have the ability to engage in that deep way. 

And sometimes you can, you can buy that engagement, right? Because either you have more time because you have more money, or you can pay someone else to have the time to do it. 

[00:34:55] Doug: Yeah. And I think it goes to show why we fight so hard to get people who actually live this, who take the bus when they're traveling, who rent, who've lived urbanism in a more direct way in office and in positions of power. Because we see that windshield perspective from folks here, you know, who, who can't imagine that this stuff would work, whether it is a bus lane or a crisis center to help get people back on their feet. Like when you're rich and you drive everywhere, it's hard for you to imagine that. And it's some of these same people oppose the Capitol Hill superblock too. So some of these bigger urbanism swings or just public works swings like the crisis center, like they, they don't really have that. They're not invested in it. 

You could be someone who can do something cool, like Liz Dunn is one of the people in the story. You know, she has Chophouse Row one of the coolest urbanist projects, as far as like a bunch of small vendors in an alley. And, it's won awards. It's a really cool space. But she hasn't really bought into like the super block or the bus lane or the crisis center in the neighborhood. It's kind of more just what makes sense to her, her own worldview. And it's still car based. 

[00:36:00] Amy: And I feel like you might have concierge healthcare at that point, right? So your problems are just very different. Like, I think one of the things that struck me as being just like super cool about these crisis care centers is that you can walk in, and if for some reason you haven't been able to get your prescription for whatever medication for behavioral health issues that you might be taking, which is pretty common, that there is like some kind of gap in that you can just walk in, wait and then get your prescription renewed and get some of the medicine right away. And I feel like just that alone is a huge problem for folks that is gonna be solved by having these centers. 

[00:36:42] Doug: Absolutely, and it's so needed. We've, we've known this as a crisis for so long. I mean, we sometimes conflate the homelessness crisis and the mental health crisis, but there are definitely people who are experiencing both, but they're both things that we've known have been a crisis for a long time. Homelessness was the declared crisis over a decade ago. And, you know, we're all out of ideas and we've tried nothing. But at least now, if we built these, these crisis centers, we'd be trying something big that's actually on the scale. 

I'm being a little facetious. We've tried things, but we haven't really tried to ever scale things to the point where actually everyone who needs healthcare could get it. Or everyone who is falling through the cracks and needs shelter and then ultimately a permanent house to live in has that. Our solutions have always been piecemealing. There's been way too many cracks between. 

[00:37:30] Amy: Exactly. 

[00:37:32] Ryan: Yeah. So we'll be following the county's process to get the Capital Health Crisis Care Center open and move on to the other crisis care centers. They're approved by voters in 2020. Another story happening at King County that the urbanist broke this week involves King County Metro and its fare enforcement program. 

The Urbanist was the first outlet to notice that a report had quietly dropped on the first few months of the resumed fare enforcement restarted last May. The data that they produced through the end of 2025, was kind of eye-popping in terms of the fact that only eight citations were issued for not paying fares on King County Metro buses across that timeframe. 

Around 2200 warnings, but only eight citations, none of which actually ended up going through because of lack of information, like a fake address or incomplete information. And so, the story got picked up by quite another number of outlets, after The Urbanist broke the story, some of which didn't, didn't credit us, but, the issue is how are we ensuring that people are paying their fares without resorting to punitive citations that send people to collections court? And obviously no one wants that. And we've done a lot of work in the fare enforcement space in the past couple years to ensure that there are different pathways for people. But if they're not being utilized... What was your reaction to this story, Amy? 

[00:39:03] Amy: It was very interesting that there was so little utilization, actually getting these citations. You know, I have very mixed feelings about fare enforcement personally. This isn't something I've covered, so I haven't done extensive research on it, but the first thing I always think of is the question of equity. 

So, I'm pleased that they had all these options that weren't as punitive, that somebody could do. But I do then wonder, is the price, I think it's being framed as, oh, well we're doing education, which is fine, but you have to ask the question then, is the price you're paying for these fare enforcement officers worth the education that you're doing? 

And, I don't necessarily know how to answer that, but it's certainly a question that came to mind. 

[00:39:50] Ryan: Yeah. The thing that I think about with this is maybe citations aren't the right metric, which is what Metro's spokesperson told us, in our story. But what is, I guess, how do we quantify progress in the system if the citations aren't really the best metric? 

And when we're talking about equity, that's another element of this is we're only doing fare enforcement on a few routes, like 10, around 10 routes, a lot of which are actually clustered in the southern half of King County. The 7, A Line, 36, the 106. So like, almost half of the routes are in areas where we would expect these disproportionate impacts. 

So why are we not doing random fare enforcement on buses across the county? That's another question I have. If we're trying to make sure that we are equity based, then why are we doing all of our fare enforcement on the 7, I guess is my question. So it's kind of interesting to me. 

[00:40:44] Amy: Well, and then there's a question of even with the best of intentions, who are the fare enforcement officers gonna stop and who are they gonna be like, oh, it's fine. That causes me real pause in general, which I think is partly why I am inclined to be more excited about more free transit. 

[00:41:04] Ryan: Mm-hmm. 

[00:41:05] Doug: I think that it's really complicated. This is a tough one, but Metros claim that it's not just the citation rate that we should be concerned about. They did have some data to back that up, I guess. That they were saying, even though we haven't seen a ton of citations on these routes, they did see the compliance rate go up on the routes they're enforcing is what they said. So there's sort of an effect of, you see someone getting checked and then you're more likely to actually pay your fare, load up more money in your card. So, if you pull the, I'm scanning my card and it, it did the wrong beep and I'm still gonna go on the bus, you know, that if you're expecting to get checked, you're more likely to actually tap. 

I would love to see the math, because part of the argument that people might make is it's costing Metro more money than they're getting back in increased fare revenue. So, they should make sure that they're actually getting a benefit, not just burning a lot of money walking around bus buses, but yeah, I don't know how accurate the compliance rate was before the pandemic. I mean, the backdrop of this is we have seen a lot more people are not tapping on since the pandemic. 

And, and part of that was because people didn't have to do that for a little while during the pandemic, because we were doing social distancing and the people couldn't enter at the front of the bus to protect the bus drivers. And I don't know if that's kind of habit forming, and you realize like, ‘oh, I don't have to pay, like, I'm not going to pay in the future.’ Or if there's some deeper sociological thing going on, but that could be a significant drag on transit funding going forward, if that continues to be the pattern or if it's just something that rebounds from the pandemic. 

[00:42:33] Ryan: Well, I think the way to think about this program, it can't be disconnected from the transit security program. Like it's ultimately a subset of that. It is essentially security officers who are focused on rider awareness, training, education, what have you. And so I think ultimately do they need, do need better metrics? 

You know, just as a reminder, a citation for fare evasion, you know, can lead to simply getting a low income ORCA card. And so I would wanna know, and I don't know why that wouldn't be in a report on this, like how many people have enrolled in a low income ORCA card because of their interactions with the fare enforcement team. That's my question. Like obviously we're not looking to say we issued hundreds of citations and people paid money that they clearly don't have. But what is the actual efficacy of this program is really the question at the end of the day. 

[00:43:32] Doug: Yeah. And it did launch a million think pieces from your more centrist, conservative crowd of people who are blaming all of this for Metro's financial woes. And that, that's pretty misleading. That's not really true. Metro's core money has always come from other tax sources, like sales tax. 

Obviously it hurts when you're missing a chunk that was coming from fare revenue, but it was never the majority. And you know, that was the emphasis in how, how a lot of news outlets were covering it, especially your TV and radio folks. So, we gotta figure out how to get Metro on a more sustainable course on long-term finances. 

And this could be part of it, but it's never gonna be the core of it, because it's just not enough money And the biggest thing hurting the fare box recovery ratio is just the industry term for how much of your operating costs are you getting back in fare revenue, is just less ridership periods since the pandemic. So that's another way to tackle this problem is just get more ridership, on top of there just being higher operating costs because of inflation. So, all of the goods that go into providing your Metro service, including paying the driver, paying for the fuel, paying for the maintenance of the vehicle, the parts in the vehicle that break down, like all that stuff's got more expensive, our fares have only gone up a quarter. 

[00:44:48] Ryan: Well, we know what gets ridership is frequency, and frequency has gone down because we don't have as much money to invest in the service. This fall we're gonna ask voters for likely an increase in the Seattle specific transit measure. And I think a lot of people are gonna be rightfully asking what they're getting, with their dollars. 

And the fact that this is real money, it just is that. That's gonna be a sales tax. We're gonna have a discussion about whether the sales tax is regressive and that's inevitable, if we increase the Seattle transit measure. And so I think that this needs to be part of the conversation. 

[00:45:21] Amy: I will also say that when we're talking about fare enforcement, which I think you're right, you have to see it as a subset of the bus security team because it is, the reason that some of these things are an issue at all is because of underinvestment in other areas, like cities are just so interconnected. 

So, public safety is, housing is transit. Like it's, it's all together. And, why do you have people sleeping on the bus, because there's not enough emergency housing or there's not enough affordable housing, right? So people are sleeping on the bus. So it's never a simple, quick solution. 

[00:46:08] Ryan: Speaking of transit news, we've got the Sound Transit expansion plans back in the headlines this week with a discussion over whether the ST3 plan will ultimately be able to promise a station in downtown Ballard. 

We've got a realignment of the system expansion plans that is set to be finalized by the end of May. Last weekend there was a march from downtown Ballard down to Smith Cove, which could be as far as the Ballard Link extension actually gets. 

[00:46:40] Doug: Yeah, if that. It's possible they stop it in Uptown too. 

[00:46:42] Ryan: Mhmm. And so trying to raise awareness of the fact that these potential deferrals are on the table, even though there's a potential for being able to advance the project later, if more funding comes available, more cost savings are found. 

So, Doug, you've been talking to the advocates in Ballard and what are they primarily saying and asking for? 

[00:47:04] Doug: Yeah, Ballard is feeling a little left out obviously when your line goes from 2039, which was already four years delayed from what was on the ballot to a question mark. You know, people are, people are a little bit freaked out. That question mark, like you said, could go a lot of different directions depending how things play out, whether or not we line up additional funding. It could be back on the table relatively quickly from the segmented section. 

Or, it could be one of those things like we've seen throughout Seattle history where it's just kind of peters out and the time goes by way without a solution because it's hard. 

So yeah, advocates are really feeling like maybe they haven't been loud enough yet. It's an argument I heard at the last rally they had, which was early in April. And this march was an effort to get loud and be visible and they walked this 3.7 mile route, which is what is on the chopping block. 

And walking across the Ballard Bridge, I don't recommend it. But you know, it is a very visible spot to be because there's not many people who do it. You're just right next to this busy road, for the long bridge. And, they trucked their way across and ended up in Smith Cove, near Expedia, where there might be a station that might be terminus if the current plan goes forward. But they really don't want that to be the case. They see Ballard as essential, and they want to have it be on the plan with an actual date on it. And Sound Transit has so far resisted that I'm gonna try to get an answer from them soon about what timelines are feasible under this plan? 

But we did hear from Sound Transit Chair Dave Summers, who was at a rally for his local area. He's Snohomish County Executive. In addition to being Chair of Sound Transit. He was at Everett Station at the Weyerhaeuser Room for a TCC transportation talk, last week. And, you know, he just kept reiterating, they must have said, “complete the spine” two dozen times. 

And that's their shorthand for the Everett to Tacoma mainline of our system. And, he said, you know, Ballard's just unaffordable. It has to be taken off plan. There's not the money for it. He was at least saying it's important to get to the Seattle Center. And part of that's 'cause people all over the region want access to the Seattle Center and the arena that's gonna have NBA games maybe one day in addition to already having NHL and WNBA games and concerts. 

So, it seems like there's a big difference between the Seattle members and the folks from farther out, especially Pierce and Snohomish, who are really just putting all their eggs in the spine and ambivalent about ever getting to Ballard. So it's an impasse. 

And what's gonna be the deciding factor really are the King County members on the Sound Transit Board who are from suburban areas of King County, whether they see more eye to eye with their neighbors in Snohomish and Pierce County, or whether they are more willing to work with Seattle on some sort of solution that gets ballor Ballard with the same timeline or same batch, rather than being put to a future batch, or future funding project to top up and get the budget for. 

[00:50:07] Amy: So do you think this march swayed opinions of some of those people? 

[00:50:14] Doug: Um, you know, I think at this phase it's tough to say. I think it's important to know you're not gonna go down without a fight, but everyone's kind of in their camp, right? Like parochialism is kind of baked into the Sound Transit Board. There's only one member that's truly regional, and that's the WashDOT secretary gets a seat on that board. 

And, since they're based in Olympia, not in the taxing district, the agency is, they're not quite as beholden to one constituency, whereas everyone else is an elected official for a certain area, not the whole three county region. So some are at the county wide scale and they have a little broader vision like the county executives. 

But there no one who's like purely answering to regional voters like the whole district. So everyone wants their local projects done, and Dave Somers and Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin were very clear about that at their panel in Everett. So I guess Ballard's trying to return the favor and just be like, well, our project's actually the most important. 

But I think it's gonna take some doing. And I think one smart thing this group has done is there's are trying to focus on solutions that cut the cost. And, and one thing that we've pointed out, and Ryan, you're reporting too, you've mentioned okay, well Ballard Link is relatively early in planning and part of that under both Mayor Durkan and Bruce Harrell, the two previous mayors, they, they did not, uh, come to a consensus very quick on the Ballard line. So it's behind on planning. So they haven't got to the cost, the phase where you can start really drilling down on your cost savings, like West Seattle Link has done, like ever Link has done. 

And the budget went from like 12 billion ish a few years ago to now the Ballard Link budget is over 20 billion. So there's a lot of money to make up. They're not gonna have an easy path to trim that much cost. But what this group some of them have put out there, including former Seattle Department of Transportation Director Scott Kubly and Trevor Reed, who's someone who's written op-eds for the urbanist and is a transportation consultant, they are proposing to switch Ballard to a light metro and connect it with West Seattle and also do West Seattle's an automated light metro or automated light rail line. And the reason that would be such a big deal is because you can run those at really high frequencies, but with smaller trains that have much smaller stations. 

So it's a very like transportation nerd way of decreasing your station costs, especially when these lines have really deep stations in many cases. One of your big cost drivers is just how much dirt you're excavating out of the earth to build these stations. 

[00:52:50] Amy: Is the capacity the same for both types of light rail? 

[00:52:54] Doug: They say it would be because the frequency we would go up to like every two minutes instead of like six minutes. The train is like half as long, it's coming twice as much. So, it balances out, or three times as much. So yeah, it'd be a big change. 

They say they haven't gotten a formal response from Sound Transit. 'cause they sent this as a white paper to the agency earlier this month, and we ran an op-ed on the openness. So go read that op-ed if you want to dive into this proposal for an automated light metro. But the most exciting thing about it for me, in addition to just being a cutting edge technology that cities like Copenhagen have used to save a ton of money and still build their world class systems, but it's getting this system ready to actually be relatively easy to expand. 

Because if we're building it like a billion dollars per mile, like how are we gonna find that money? Whereas if we can drive that cost down, extending the Ballard line north to Crown Hill and maybe looping over to Northgate or going up somewhere else north, extending the West Seattle line south to White Center and to Burien, that's gonna be more feasible if your cost from mile cut in half rather than if we keep building it, these really exorbitant rates that we're seeing in plan so far. I know, Ryan, that you have a little different take, so I'm, I'm curious, you think that Sound Transit is, you know, I guess largely on the right track here and advocates maybe are getting a little bit too defensive. 

[00:54:23] Ryan: Well, I think we should temper our expectations. Obviously, we're not gonna know whether we can convert Ballard Link into a light metro in six weeks before we have to make a updated decisions on an an updated ST3 plan.

[00:54:34] Doug: That's definitely off the plate. I asked Chair Somers about the automation idea and he said that verbatim basically. He did say that they want staff to look at automation. I'm not sure if he understood that I was referring specifically to converting the station size as well. But, apparently staff are gonna look at automation, but obviously it's not gonna be ready for this vote, which might limit the amount of impact it can have on the financial plan. Because they're gonna reset the financial plan this summer. 

[00:55:01] Ryan: Yeah. So I think it's good to push, but we'll see what happens in May. 

[00:55:06] Doug: Well, hopefully we get to Ballard one day. Even though it still would be a little bit far from my home, I would ride it. 

[00:55:12] Amy: Yeah. That's the dream. 

[00:55:14] Ryan: I think there's a lot of opportunities for cost savings. Even if an interim terminus at Smith Cove or Seattle Center is what's currently gonna move forward. So, I don't think that's the end of the ball game. Well, thanks so much for joining us on another Urbanist podcast. We're gonna be back in two weeks with more news from around the Puget Sound. Thanks so much and have a great weekend.