Mayor Durkan Still Doesn’t Get It

A 12/06/18 post opined Mayor Durkan needed new transit advisors.  It was written in response to a Seattle Times Traffic Lab article, “Durkan associate gets $720K to steer light-rail planning”.  It detailed concerns that Durkan had chosen Shefari Ranganathan, former executive director of Transportation Choices Coalition that’d garnered tens of billions of tax dollars for transit projects, as deputy mayor.  That the mayor needed someone with the modicum of competence required to recognize Sound Transit and WSDOT failure to deal with area’s congestion.

Friday’s The Durkan Digest, “The New SR99 Tunnel Opens Monday. But the Squeeze is Far from Over” indicates she still doesn’t get it.  Her “solution” for dealing with the “squeeze” once the tunnel opens included the following:

We can’t let up. We still need to work together to make space on the roads for transit and emergency vehicles to keep moving. If you absolutely do not have to, please do not drive alone downtown. So let’s continue the great work to keep people, transit, and goods moving in Seattle. Please go to www.seattle.gov/traffic for resources from the City of Seattle and our partners to help you plan your trip. If we all make a plan and do our part, we can get through this together.  

Urging people to “not drive alone downtown” or to use “resources from the City of Seattle to help plan your trip” is not likely to reduce the number of commuters clogging the area’s roadways.   What’s needed is to give more commuters the alternative of riding public transit.  

Sound Transit hasn’t increased bus revenue hours since Prop 1 passed.   CEO Rogoff is planning to spend $96 billion on light rail extensions that do nothing to increase transit capacity into Seattle but nothing expanding bus service that would.    

Durkan needs someone who would advise her the way to “keep people, transit, and goods moving in Seattle” is to persuade Sound Transit to dramatically increase the number of riders able to use buses for their commutes into the city.  That doing so requires local bus routes from near where commuters live to T/Cs with express routes into Seattle (or Bellevue).  

That she should also use her influence to persuade WSDOT to limit an HOV lane on I-5 and I-90 to buses or with HOT fees sufficient to limit total traffic to the 2000 vehicles per hour needed to achieve 45 mph.  That giving commuters the option of fast, reliable, commutes into the city is the best way to reduce Seattle congestion.