Seattle's Mayor Harrell Holds Back Transit, Again

Harrell sticks with “do less, slower”

Bruce Harrell has a long history of moving slowly and doing little. But he’s in the political fight of his life, so now he is suddenly in front of the cameras acting like he cares about things like construction timelines for transit. 

This despite his long history of hampering things like . . . construction timelines for transit.  

When I was a tech CEO, my company went through a startup accelerator called “Techstars.” Their mantra was “do more faster.” But when Harrell talks about speeding up government, it feels like he crosses his fingers behind his back and quietly giggles “it’s opposite day!”

Either way, his actions continue to show that it is all just a show.

Slowing transit

The Harrell administration just killed an affordable bus upgrade that would have moved thousands of people per day much much faster and made our bus system more reliable. 

This comes after years of people pushing to speed up Route 8 in Seattle, notoriously known as the “Late 8” or “L8,” including at an amazing “race the bus event” filled with

The route gets over 7000 riders per day, and is one of the top ten routes in the region. In June and July it was late about 43% of the time. (Late is defined as five and a half minutes or more past the scheduled time.)

SDOT gave the following reasoning for its baffling decision not to speed up this chronically miserable, high-ridership bus. They said “analysis shows” that a bus-only lane would speed up buses, but that removing a general purpose lane to do so would slow down the cars in the remaining lane on the same street.

Analysis? They didn’t know that deleting a lane for cars reduces car capacity before they did their analysis? This decision was baked in the cake from the beginning.

What’s even more absurd about their “analysis” is it almost certainly does not pay any attention to how people’s choices change in response to traffic and transit.

We know that when a driving route gets tighter, people avoid it. When lanes get deleted, this cuts the number of cars on the roads at that time by a lot, and the number of cars on that specific street by a lot more. We also know that if transit is faster, many of those drivers will switch to transit, providing further benefits. This is why Seattle’s (including SDOT’s!) constant predictions of carmageddon during extended road shutdowns never materialize. The reverse is true as well. Scientific research has shown time and time again that increased lane capacity convinces people to drive more, and that this ends up increasing traffic.

Here is a great little video on why “one more lane” never fixes the problem, and the only solution to traffic in cities is to provide alternates to expensive, land consuming car infrastructure. Just watch from the starting point I set for the video (11:28) through 15:30.

The Harrell administration also completely ignores the fact that a bus lane has 5-7x the capacity for moving people compared to a regular car lane. Bus lanes are cheap to create, too, because doing so mostly just takes red paint.

In other words, if Harrell’s administration really cared about maximizing the throughput of commuters on Denny Way, it would hand a lane over to buses, as this could move far, far more people. 

In a Bizarro twist on Mr. Spock’s rule of thumb*–Bruce Harrell is going to prioritize speed for a few car drivers over the speed of many bus riders (and over climate health). 

One only has to think about Harrell’s recent statement “I embrace the wealthy” to understand why.

Scaling back road safety

This is all part of a pattern, of course.

Just six weeks ago, after lobbying from rich neighbors who just want to drive fast, Harrell scaled back promised safety improvements on Lake Washington Boulevard. This came after 5 years of process and watering down and a recent hit-and-run that victimized a teen on a bike. SDOT internal emails also show that staff knew that public feedback was clear—people wanted the safety improvements—and that these improvements were warranted. But Harrell’s office overrode them. Unsurprisingly, the city tried to cover up their gutting of the safety improvements. 

When Harrell poses for the cameras to show he has pep in his step when it comes to delivering real outcomes for the city, feel free to pause and remember the proof has always been in the pudding—for a dozen years on council, three as Mayor, and now twice more in the last six weeks. 

*I don’t know if it’s wrong to mix the Superman and the OG Star Trek universes, but it made me very happy to do it. 
**Photo credit, Seattle Times.