Last month, days after the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) finished installing a paint-and-post protected bike lane on 8th Avenue between the Convention Center and Denny Triangle, Mayor Jenny Durkan appeared at a podium next to the bikeway flanked by City staff and advocates. Her appearance there, introduced by SDOT Director Sam Zimbabwe, marked the first time the Mayor has appeared at an event focused on bike infrastructure in her first 21 months on the job.
Celebrating the opening of a bike lane is notable, considering that grand opening ceremonies for the bike lanes previously completed under Mayor Durkan’s watch were skipped: the final costs for both the 7th Avenue bike lane and the extension of 2nd Avenue bike lane were published at around the same time, drawing criticism for being much higher than anticipated. Many saw last week’s event as an indication that the Durkan Administration might be trying to get bicycle safety advocates to warm to them. But it would be tempting to read too much into a perfunctory event to capitalize on the completion of Bicycle Master Plan mileage funded through the Washington State Convention Center addition, which contributed $6 million toward the interim protected bike lane that’s there today and its permanent form to be completed in 2023.
For me, the most important thing that happened at the event came after the prepared remarks, when the Mayor was asked (by Heidi Groover of The Seattle Times, in the first question of an impromptu press conference) if the Durkan Administration is treating the street safety crisis in Seattle with the urgency that’s necessary. The Mayor’s response:
Absolutely. As I said, Sam Zimbabwe and I have been talking repeatedly about this and we’ve got to make sure we go in a different direction. We’ve had far too many conflicts and collisions and crashes between pedestrians and bikes and vehicles and streetcars and light rail and we want to double down on that to make sure sure that we go in the other direction. In a city of our growing size, we’ve got to do more to protect people, not less.
In a follow up, when asked what more the administration is doing than previous ones have, she did not name any actions that have been taken:
We’re going to be looking at a range of things including how we use as much of the money coming out of the Mega Block sale to actually focus on Vision Zero. We know from data where those areas are that there’s repeated incidents and we want to focus on those. We also know that we have underspent in the South part of Seattle and we’ve got to get more projects for safety in South Seattle.
There’s a lot to unpack in these comments, with a key point being a Mayor who does not even appear to acknowledge traffic violence on an event-to-event level while using her Twitter account to talk about a lot of other events happening in the city.
