Seattle Times continues phony 'war on cars'

First published on Crosscut in 2016

Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times has just “had it up to here” with the “War on Cars.”  His frustrations came pouring out in a recently published screed in the Seattle Times, catalyzed by his discovery that Seattle will no longer measure the effectiveness of a street by how many cars it carries.

I hate to break it to Dudley, but Seattle — like most big cities — gave up on that a while ago. I discovered this in the early 2000s, when my neighborhood was pushing the city to reevaluate the traffic light on 85th and Greenwood. We hoped that by making it more efficient we could reduce cut through traffic on residential streets. We learned the intersection was operating at LOS (Level of Service) D, and was about to downgrade to F. That sounded pretty bad, until the traffic engineers admitted that they had given up on trying to make urban intersections operate at LOS A. Too many cars, they explained.

The Seattle Department of Transportation made some changes to improve the intersection’s efficiency, but they knew that 85th and Greenwood would never meet national performance standards written for massive suburban intersections.

Becoming LOS A, the gold standard for auto movement, would have meant tearing down the historic four corners of Greenwood to make room for turn lanes, and maybe more through lanes. That would have been a great way to ruin Greenwood, and no one would seriously propose or consider it.

The discussion opened my eyes to the obvious — streets aren’t just for moving cars. Or even for moving buses, bikes, and people on foot. They are places that support the social and economic activity of a community and should be designed that way.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Think of a place optimized for auto movement. No intersections, pesky pedestrians, or annoying bikers.  Just wide lanes, gentle curves and generous shoulders. Got it yet?  It’s called a highway, and they’re great for going long distances fast. They have a role between our cities, but if your car breaks and you have to walk, they’re pretty hellish.  Even in our cities, there’s nothing there. No stores, restaurants, churches, theaters, parks or people -  just traffic thundering by. The exact opposite of a city street, in other words.

One of the worst things we can do is take perfectly good city streets and use outdated LOS standards to optimize them for car throughput. Aurora, Rainier, MLK, Lake City Way, Delridge, 85th Street, 15th NW are all places that can feel more like the side of a highway than a thriving place. Retail and housing struggle. People on foot look out of place. Crime and urban blight is more likely. That’s the price you pay to rush commuters out of town.

In contrast, the best neighborhood business districts tame the cars coming through — just like Columbia City and Lake City are trying to do. As a result, the streets support all sorts of community needs. Strong retail, sidewalk cafes, kids walking to school, art walks, even tourists coming to visit. The streets are so great that they even ban cars once in a while (the horror!) to support parades and festivals.

Dudley claims that our economy suffers when we fail to optimize for cars, citing the alleged millions lost to traffic delays. This measurement illustrates just how car-centric we have become.  Has anyone measured how much time pedestrians wait for cross signals and then attempted to attach a dollar figure to that? Or how much time bus riders spend stuck waiting for cars to let the bus back into traffic? Or the delays caused to bikers taking roundabout ways to find a safe route?

By the time we added it all up the city would be drowning in red ink, our balance sheets tattered by the fact that we have so many people traveling in so many different ways.  Yet the exact opposite is true — those who dive deep into the analysis find that traffic delay is associated with more jobs closer to where people live and that’s a good thing.

The popularity of many of our most congested streets suggests a better way to measure their performance. How about tax revenue per square foot of asphalt?  Downtown Seattle, despite its crowded streets and expensive parking, is the supreme champion of the Pacific Northwest in this regard. I’ll put Greenwood, with its multistory mixed use buildings and narrow streets, against any strip mall fronting a six lane shrine to automobiles.  This is no small matter as we struggle to keep that asphalt from falling into disrepair.

Over at Publicola, Josh Feit does a great job of demonstrating that arts attendance isn’t plagued by congestion, as claimed by Dudley, instead revenue and attendance is increasing. The arts are most successful in our densest places because that’s where the action is.  Similarly, creative chef Tom Douglas claimed that increases in parking rates would hobble his businesses.  Since then he has opened numerous successful new restaurants. Busy streets start to look like a metric of success, not failure.

When we think about streets this way, SDOT’s proposal to measure streets by how few cars are on it also misses the mark. It puts cars and mobility at the center of the discussion and prevents us from more insightful metrics about the role of streets in the urban environment.

I’ve suggested financial and cultural metrics already, but there are plenty of other metrics of success.

How about “zero deaths and serious injuries”?  That’s been city policy since 2012. Right now about as many people a year die in traffic as are murdered. Yet all too often we are told we cannot make streets safer because it would harm traffic too much.  That’s why the city does not do “road diets” on streets carrying more than 20,000 cars a day, even though these safety redesigns have dramatically reduced deaths and serious injuries. Mobility trumps safety, often with tragic results.

Here’s another metric — public health. People living in close proximity to busy roads breathe more “ultrafine” pollutants, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. Walkable neighborhoods reduce the risk of obesity and diabetes.  And it is widely accepted that economically disadvantaged and minority populations share a disproportionate burden of air pollution exposure and risk.

Or maybe we might consider global warming.  Over 60 percent of Seattle’s emissions are from the transportation sector. I’m looking forward to more electric cars, but walking, biking and electrified transit are a major part of the solution, as well as helping folks live closer to jobs and services.

This is why the “war on cars” rhetoric is so counterproductive. Reducing the discussion of a successful street to how well it moves cars is simply foolish. The real issues are about economic and cultural vitality, public safety, and our future.

When Dudley cools down from his latest bout with traffic and takes a look beyond the windshield of his car, he might see most folks aren’t out to get him. They just think there are some other important things to work on.

In Defense of Dumb Cities

Okay, kind of a cute title - but all the “smart city” stuff was getting to me. Posted first on Medium, January 2020, and then at Strongtowns:

It is a recurring trend, occasionally rising to craze, to imagine that cities will be transformed by technology into entirely different places. Seattle has been participating since its world fair in 1962 (monorails and jetpacks anyone?) and most recently with a tech advisory board to tap into the expertise of local wizards at Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, etc. The phenomenon is by no means restricted to Seattle, with “Smart City” conferences and articles abounding, breathless descriptions of automated vehicles, and a growing number of city-corporate partnerships to tap into big data and the internet of things.

It’s time to take a deep breath and reflect on the all the “dumb” things that make cities great, because shared data and information is only part of the puzzle. And this is said with no malice towards what technology can add — as Seattle mayor from 2009–13 we opened up data portals, posted an accountability dashboard, championed municipal broadband, launched a “Find-it, Fix it” app, as well as real time maps on freezing roads, rainfall, and “where’s my snowplow.” We even held the first “civic hackathon.” Shared information matters in cities. It is one of the reasons cities form — to be close to the knowledge and activity of others. But it is far from the only one. And investing in a supposedly smart future won’t overcome the failure to get the dumb technologies right.

So here is my list of critical dumb technologies — tried and true, nothing fancy, but supremely important:

Walking

Not technically a technology, but everything trying to replace it is a technology — so play along here. In fact, walking upright may be the ur disruptive technology. A city that prioritizes fast moving vehicles on its streets is dangerously interfering with the exchange of ideas and goods that are at the heart of places. It’s not just that people on foot are pushed to the edges or into cars. The space taken up by cars moving or being stored separates destinations. And all those lights increase delay. (By the way, why is that never measured as destroying productivity for pedestrians in the way that traffic jams destroy productivity for drivers)? Plus, walking is healthy, has no carbon emissions, no smog, and no particulates that cause cancer. Show us a place full of people walking, and it is almost by definition low impact and economically productive in relation to the space it occupies.

The Wheel

It’s the technology that every school kid recognizes, along with fire, as one of our greatest technologies. I’m not talking about cars, just wheels without a massive engine attached. Wheelchairs, strollers, bikes, skateboards, scooters, and yes, even those dang solo wheels. Curb cuts, wide safewalks, protected bikeways, along with intersection design that prioritizes them, is another highly effective way to connect humans to each other — to share information, conduct commerce, create art, and decide matters of civic importance. Successful places soon outgrow their capacity to make those connections if everyone is encapsulated in a car, endlessly circling the block for a space, or spiraling upwards or downwards in the parking garage. But you can add a lot of wheels powered by people or lightweight electric motors — particularly if you take away some of the space occupied by cars.

Streets and public squares

Streets are the spaces between buildings in settled and developed places. Historically, they are open to all users. And in some places, often the intersections near important buildings, they become public squares and public markets. We need to distinguish between streets and roads. Roads connect distant places — the Yellow Brick Road, the network of Roman roads, the Silk Road, the railroad, the interstate highway. Somewhere after the invention of the car we got the idea to turn city streets into roads — prioritizing the fast movement of vehicles through the place. We need to return to the ancient idea of streets, where people in the place move about, connect to each other and congregate. Name the places you love to visit, and they probably have streets and public squares where lingering is the point. It’s a basic technology that people inherently love — time tested and resilient.

Of course, great streets and public squares are surrounded by buildings so let’s talk about those.

Roofs, Walls and Houses

After the 2015 Nepal earthquake I was talking to a Nepalese friend and asked if there was a problem getting housing supplies into remote regions. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and in my modern-culture-addled brain I had an “aha” moment. Rural Nepalese make homes out of the materials near at hand. And until recent times, that was the way it’s been done by all people since, well, the dawn of people. Whether brick, timber, stone, mud, cloth, peat or palm frond, people instinctively create shelter. And with the barest of time and attention they become more than just enough, they become homes, which ascend to comfort, graciousness, beauty and in some cases magnificence.

Somehow we have literally made it illegal to satisfy this basic human need. You can’t just build shelter. We have a host of regulations telling people “no rooming houses, no backyard cottages, not too many unrelated people living together, no apartments — and if you can’t afford what is legal — tough luck. And if you dare pitch a tent somewhere — we’ll take it.” We need to re-legalize shelter. I’m not talking about abandoning building codes — there are important health and safety reasons to ensure buildings don’t collapse, contribute to conflagration or generate disease through unsanitary conditions. But there is a clear path to ensure that one of our oldest technologies, a roof over one’s head, is accessible to all. If you want to build a home, or many homes, in a city, you should be able to do that without much discussion or argument. We can tax the wealth a city creates to build for those a liberalized market can’t reach. And we can leave places to pitch a tent or build a tiny home until housing is available. An app won’t solve the lack of housing, only homes will do that.

Mixed use buildings

When I was a kid, we just bought “sneakers” and we used them for everything. Then came tennis shoes, jogging shoes, basketball shoes, and the final iteration — the “cross trainer” (sneakers, right?). The advent of zoning led to a similar phenomena, the increasing specialization of buildings for specific uses, and a restriction against building another type in that zone. There’s a reason to separate truly noxious uses from other uses, but we separated offices from workshops from homes, and even different types of homes from each other. Financing rules reinforced the zoning and use restrictions. The traditional mixed use building — the store or workshop downstairs the residences beside or above, was now illegal. So was converting a single family into a duplex or triplex. What seems orderly and rational turns out to be highly restrictive and uneconomic. Buildings in such zones could not shift to meet changing times. Yet cities built before comprehensive zoning plans are full of buildings that were used again and again for different uses. Those are often the cities with walkable streets that we love. Mixed use buildings — can we make them cool like Converse All-Stars?

Ok — I’m stopping here, before I get to insulation and windows that work. Or awnings and trees to regulate heat as opposed to high-tech thermostats. You’ve probably figured out that I think traditional city design is pretty smart. But it’s smart because it is simple, durable, resilient, redundant, even anti-fragile (like muscles, gets stronger with a little stress on it). Wringing some more efficiency out of our cities through tech is great, but efficiency is often complicated, fragile in the face of small disturbances, and prioritizes one thing at the expense of the diversity of things a city does. It takes incredible intelligence and diligence to invent the tech and keep it running. It has a “wow” factor and a place in our cities. But an even bigger wow is to realize that building a city upon walking, low-tech wheels, streets, many homes and mixed use buildings can create a city of complexity beyond our human comprehension. It’s an incredibly smart platform to make the most of our human potential and creativity. The dumb city stands the test of time. And that is the best prediction that the simple tech of traditional city building will be here for some time to come, if we’re smart enough to use it.

Why The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Should Divest from Fossil Fuels

Following is an Op-Ed I co-wrote that appeared originally in the Guardian 

Seattle has found itself at a crossroads of the fight against fossil fuel extraction. Heading right through our waterfront are coal trains from Wyoming, oil trains from North Dakota, and Shell’s Arctic drilling fleet. It is quite the juxtaposition. Progressive Seattle, with its climate hugging politicians, tied to the fossil fuel extraction it claims to oppose.

It’s the same challenge faced worldwide. At the same time as we make extraordinary advances in conservation and alternative energy sources, we lack the political will to stop fossil fuel extraction at the source. Bring on the solar panels, wind turbines, electric transit, bike lanes and LED lights, but if we keep pumping, digging and burning fossil fuel reserves we will still lose the fight. Scientists tell us that approximately 80% of our known reserves must stay in the ground to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

So how do we break the vicious cycle of fossil fuel companies operating with impunity? They want to convince us that fossil fuel use is inevitable, and that we must simply acquiesce, nay, even invest, in expectation of their profits. What a cynical view of the future.

That is where the fossil fuel divestment movement comes in. It asks us to make a simple choice. Do we keep investing in fossil fuel use, or do we start investing in the future we want? While no one individual or institution divesting will tip the scales, collectively it is a movement that tells politicians and the public that it’s possible to imagine a future free of fossil fuels. That vision of the future is essential to unlock the social, cultural, and political changes we desperately need.

That’s why we’re asking the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to divest from fossil fuels. As their Seattle neighbours, we want them to join the fastest growing divestment movement in history – one that has now grown to 400 institutions worth a collective $2.6tn (1.7tn). And we want our campaign to inspire others in Seattle and beyond to join the movement.

When our political institutions fail, as they have with climate change, it falls upon the people to compel the social change we need. To call upon influential institutions and leaders to align their actions with their stated values. Indeed, to hold all of us accountable to the vision of the future we believe in.

It was Bill and Melinda Gates’ humanity that compelled their mission: “Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.” It is that vision and humanity that makes their voices so powerful and why we ask them to join us.

Every day we see how climate change threatens that vision. The desperate refugees from the Middle East and Africa fleeing political instability fuelled by drought. The Pacific islanders watching their low-lying atolls slowly disappear. Searing heat plaguing locations around the globe.

It comes home to us here in Seattle too. Our poor breathe air far more polluted than the air breathed by the rich. Our East African community mourns those dying in the Mediterranean while struggling to make their place in a new city. Our Asian Pacific islander community watches typhoons hurtling to their hometowns. The largest wildfires ever in Washington state torch homes and blanket rural communities in smoke for months on end.

It is simply not okay anymore to say “we have a duty to profit as much as we can from our investments, regardless of the costs to the rest of society”. Or “it won’t make a difference anyway”.

Nor is it OK to say “the real solution is in a technological breakthrough”. The technology breakthroughs are already here, as conservation and alternative energy rapidly approach or exceed fossil fuels in cost effectiveness. The smart money has already moved away from coal investments. Carbon Tracker has demonstrated that the extraordinary costs of tar sands and Arctic oil drilling will make them unaffordable as well, and that the next big investment bubble to burst is the “carbon bubble”.

On divestment, all that is left is to say is which side you stand on – with the oil, gas and coal companies, or against them? With a future that truly values every human life, or a future that values the next increment of investment profit no matter how risky or damaging?

Here in Seattle we are building a coalition that knows what side it stands on. We will spend our energy urging the Gates Foundation and others to join the divestment movement. When they join it will be a signal for many others to join. If you want to help you can find us at gatesdivest.org.

When the grassroots and the powerful unite, change is inevitable. When the representatives of the world’s governments arrive in Paris to negotiate a climate treaty, let it be with as many voices as possible calling for the change we need.

Helping People Return From Prison

The following was originally posted in The Stranger in 2015 but the fundamental challenge remains relevant today - we need to invest in helping people return to their communities from prison:

In 2013, at the urging of my staff, I went to visit the Black Prisoner’s Caucus at the Monroe State Correctional Complex. I had driven past the prison many times on the way to hiking in the mountains, but this time we took a right turn and drove to the front gate.

We were let through the main gate and then pulled up to a watchtower. A bucket was let down by a rope so that the SPD officer tasked with my security could relinquish his gun. We then proceeded to the main administration building, a substantial old brick building with ancient wood furnishings, where we met the rest of our party and checked in.

Our group was mainly city employees and contractors who had formed our new Career Bridge program, a reentry program for felons leaving prison.

A little backstory: In early 2012, the city had seen a spike in murders. I had declared it an emergency and had been scrambling for better approaches. I went to every murder site to be briefed by Deputy Chief Jim Pugel on what SPD knew. I met with community groups to hear their ideas. In a meeting with a group of black pastors they pointed to the high recidivism of felons returning to the community and offered a solution. Pastor Ricky Willis said “Mayor, we know which men are prepared to try and make it. They need jobs and housing but they also need a community that will help support them. Partner with us, bring your resources and we will bring the community support network to help these men.”

From my years of community activism this made a lot of sense to me. People are motivated by a goal of better future, but it’s the relationships with others that bring us back to the fight again and again. Making it after a felony conviction would be a tough fight and well meaning government programs would not be enough.

Our Human Services Department Director, Dannette Smith, and OED Director Steve Johnson were highly motivated too. Within a short time they brought me back a program that would combine human services programs, job training programs, and, most critically, the community support network offered by churches. We would start with the black churches and then expand it demographically. We redirected $210,000 of existing dollars and launched it as soon as we could. Many months later, we were now in Monroe to meet some of the first cohorts to start the training program.

We went through a big locked door to enter the prison foyer. With doors locked behind us and in front of us they checked IDs again and put us through a metal detector. We then entered the main prison, down a corridor and into an open area. Our walkway was fenced off from a field filled with men, many of whom stopped to watch us, some calling out to us. We passed silently. We then entered another building, walked down a hallway, and went into a room to meet the approximately forty men of the Black Prisoners Caucus.

Each one stepped forward looked me in the eye, gave me a firm handshake, and introduced himself. I’m a Mayor, I know handshakes, and I smiled because somebody had been working on handshakes!

We sat in a circle and opened by going around the circle to introduce ourselves, to be followed by Q and A. The Caucus had been formed in 1972 by men who were determined to support each other and improve their lot in life. They had fought for recognition within the prison system and won it. Some of the men would be there a long time and this was how they would contribute. Others would be there a shorter time and were determined to not repeat the mistakes that led them to prison.

In the circle I heard a lot of resolve to do better and pride in what they were doing for each other. I could also see the anxiety of those contemplating their release from jail, as well as fear of the challenges that lay in front of them. The risk of failure was very real and they knew it.

One of the men recited the “Five A’s” of the Career Bridge training program: Attendance, Attitude, Ability, Adaptability, and Accountability. You had to work on all five. When it came to me I recited back the Five A’s and let them know it was pretty good advice for a Mayor, too. While my attendance was strong, I was still working on the rest. I told them how we formed the program, and that my main goal here was to listen to them.

It came around to Mary Flowers, a black Human Services Department employee who was present at most of our staff meetings on Career Bridge, but who at the time I barely knew. She spoke some of the history, but then she spoke of the damage to the community of our system of mass incarceration. The emotions of the moment got to her as she shouted “they are destroying our communities, they are taking away our men!”

I cannot attempt to describe to you the effect all this had on me. It is one thing to see the statistics. It is another to listen to the people living it.

I am far from the first to see the need for change. County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has called for comprehensive reform, telling me: “We have mass systems for arrest, prosecution and incarceration, we now need mass systems of reentry.” The book “The New Jim Crow” details the structural racist bias that feeds these systems of mass incarceration.

As I have subsequently learned more about the Black Prisoners Caucus from Mary Flowers, I also realized Career Bridge was not my idea, nor was it Pastor Willis’s. The idea was seeded by the Caucus and reached us. The prisoners themselves are the true agents of change in this story. They were waiting and hoping for the seed to take root.

In fall 2013 we budgeted $400,000 for maintaining what we started, and proposed another $400,000 in 2014 to expand Career Bridge. The initial evidence from the first cohorts was very strong. We also proposed expanding our Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative to 18-21 year olds. Right now we just say, “We’re done at 18.” I don’t treat my own kids that way, and neither do most of us.

We did so because it was good for these men, good for public safety, and good for the community. Black lives matter. Unfortunately, the City Council rejected these expansions. It was an election year and there were other priorities.

They diverted the Career Bridge money to an audit. It finally came back in June 2015 to no fanfare. It is a very positive report. Eighty one percent of the men ended up with jobs, which while not the sole indicator of success, is a very powerful one. The audit confirmed Career Bridge as “a creative approach to combining public funds with community-based activism.” While the audit suggested improvements, it confirmed that “participants face multiple barriers to self-sufficiency and Career Bridge is increasingly well-equipped to address these needs.”

With the skeptics now answered we should expand Career Bridge. While not in the latest proposed budget, there is still time. And in our booming economy there is certainly sufficient money. It is a long-term solution to the almost two-year rise in shootings and violent crime. Most important, it can be a tangible and effective part of fixing our broken system.

As we stood up to end the meeting in Monroe, the men had only one request for me. “Will you promise not to forget us?” One of the rewards of being a former mayor is that I have many fewer commitments to remember and keep. This, however, is one promise that weighs on me. These individuals are determined to build a better life for themselves and their community. We all benefit when we give them effective tools to do so. Let’s do so.