Since 2023, WSDOT has been looking at ways that the ramps around Judkins Park Station can be modified to improve safety and start to repair some of the damage from the construction of I-90 in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to the pairing of a state and federal grant, the department is looking at station access and will advance a concept to early level of design that can be fully funded by the legislature.

Last week, the department announced that it had selected that preferred concept after more than a year of working with a community advisory group on different alternatives.

The preferred option WSDOT is now advancing would fully eliminate the northbound ramp from westbound I-90, an interchange that flies directly over a corner of Judkins Park itself. Northbound drivers would instead utilize the same ramp used by southbound drivers on the other side of Rainier, with that intersection either being modified into a full traffic signal or a roundabout. The eastbound ramp onto I-90 from the south would be squared up like a normal city intersection.

Other options looked at included squaring up all four ramps to improve visibility and reduce speeds, and removing some of the other ramps, including the one between the light rail station entrance and S Massachusetts Street. But removing other ramps, according to WSDOT’s modelling, would have caused traffic to back up I-90, and those alternatives were taken off the table.

In trying to weigh the four different options, WSDOT used three different sets of criteria to balance tradeoffs, including not just parameters set by the state project team, but also parameters set by the community advisory group — one prioritizing active transportation in the area, and one “balancing” the needs of different modes travelling through the corridor.

“Alternative 2, by far, had the best value, and it wasn’t even close, in any of the three weighting [criteria], it really was head and shoulders above it,” WSDOT’s April Delchamps told The Urbanist.

Rainier Avenue presents its own issues. A key input into how much traffic ends up on the I-90 ramps is the number of traffic lanes on Rainier, something that is ultimately controlled by the City of Seattle. To model the future needs of the I-90 ramps, the state needed to make assumptions around how much traffic volumes would change into the future as the city grows, but multimodal travel options increase.

Different sensitivity tests were run on those assumptions, but ultimately WSDOT was able to affirm that Rainier Avenue functioned well with just one general purpose lane continuing through the interchange in each direction, along with a dedicated bus lane. That represents a 50% decrease compared to the current configuration.

“This interchange is really uniquely placed in our system. I can’t really point to another interchange in the Puget Sound that is this unique [or] that is comparable. Seattle is growing, and that population is increasing, and there are a lot of assumptions around people making more trips than ever. But there really is a key difference, as you look to the future and look at the modeling and the traffic volumes that were that were given by the [Seattle] Comprehensive Plan, is that not everyone is going to be driving a car,” Delchamps said.

She noted that even though the range of assumptions about traffic growth were broad, they all ultimately pointed in the same direction.

“The interesting thing in this case is the roadway looks pretty much similar on the channelization. That sensitivity test shows that both, it’s not overbuilding, but it would still function in the opening year. So, the solution is the same,” Delchamps said.

While the removal of the northbound ramp and reducing the number of lanes on Rainier would be a big win, transportation advocates aren’t necessarily ready to stop there. Anna Zivarts, a member of the I-90 Judkins Park advisory group and the founder of the Nondrivers Alliance, has pushed WSDOT and SDOT to dream bigger and take bigger steps to improve safety and curb pollution, including in a recent pair of Urbanist op-eds.

“I really wish, and continue to want to push for us to model what would it be like to actually fully close the ramps there,” Zivarts told The Urbanist. “I think as a city, we need to be reducing car capacity on our highways and all of our urban highways — both state and federal and the ones that are operated by the city. And the only way to do that is to really reduce the amount of space for vehicles and that’s the big picture.”

“It is a step in the right direction. We’re looking at this intersection redesign from a crash prevention perspective, and also trying to maintain vehicle throughput,” Zivarts said. “They’re not looking at any of the other public health implications of having all the vehicle throughput through this area. We’re not looking at noise, we’re not looking at air [and] particle pollution, and those just aren’t being factored into any of the analysis and that that feels like a huge gap to me.”

Even just achieving the slimdown that WSDOT wants to see will remain a heavy lift, with a construction timeline still up-in-the-air. Much will depend on the state legislature’s willingness to fund restorative infrastructure like this. The federal Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP) Grant Program, funded by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, would have provided a clear pathway to funding these changes, but those dollars were pulled back in 2025 by a Republican-led Congress.

“Now that we’re at the place where we have a preferred alternative, we can start digging into what the stormwater needs to ensure the ramps are not contributing to something like that. And once we can get through a little bit of that design — and we’re funded for that piece — we can start having a better sense of exactly how much we need for construction, and we can seek funding for that,” Delchamps said. “I wish I had a year that I could give, because I think there’s just so much swirl around funding, both at the state and the federal level, that’s hard to assume.”

Given that uncertainty, Zivarts wants the state to take an opportunity to think about being even more bold.

“We’re not talking about this getting fixed next year or the next two years,” Zivarts said. “This is really looking at the future of this area and what we want for it. I think we should be thinking a little bigger and dreaming. We’re having this incredible transit investment right there, it should be a wonderful place to live and work and go to school.”

The post WSDOT Advances Plan to Tame I-90 Ramps at Judkins Park Station first appeared on The Urbanist.

Highways have a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of our city. If you think about a part of Seattle that is particularly unsafe and hostile to pedestrians, it’s probably adjacent to highway infrastructure. Not only is this infrastructure unsafe and unpleasant to live next to because of air and noise pollution, urban highways actively make it harder for transit to compete with the time it takes to get somewhere driving. 

Take, for example, my weekly trip from Rainier Valley to bring my kid to language classes near Northgate. Best case scenario, If we were to bike to and from the nearest light rail station, it’s a one-hour-and-15-minute trip. Driving would take 20 minutes. This disparity is why Seattleites drive for most non-commute trips. 

Despite our relatively extensive and frequent transit access, our urban freeways make driving almost always faster. When Commute Seattle’s Survey respondents were asked why they drive alone, the top response was: “It makes my trip significantly shorter.” One of the reasons Canada has higher transit ridership in all their cities than the U.S. is that they didn’t build urban highways to the extent we did. Transit remains more competitive.

What do I mean by “urban highways” in the context of Seattle? In this definition, I’d include I-5 and I-90, as well as state routes like SR 99 (Aurora Avenue), SR 522 (Lake City Way), and SR 513 (Sandpoint Way). City-owned routes that restrict crossings to speed car traffic also function as urban highways: this would include the West Seattle high bridge  Spokane Street Viaduct, and 15th Avenue NW in Ballard. 

I’d go as far as to include some of our legacy state highways as well — like Rainier Avenue, which includes many quarter-mile long stretches between traffic signals, encouraging higher driving speeds and more crashes for pedestrians, bikers, and drivers alike. 

So what can we do? First off, as Kadie Bell Sata suggested in her recent Urbanist op-ed, “The multi-year maintenance project known as Revive I-5 should have been a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift trips away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward transit, walking, rolling, and biking.” As Bell Sata suggests, it’s not too late. There’s still time for our city to use these closures as an opportunity, but it will require clear leadership and focus. 

The city of Seattle needs a clear mayoral directive that ensures that every project that touches our city encourages a mode shift away from single occupancy car trips and reduces gross (not just per capita) vehicle miles travelled (VMT). This needs to include City of Seattle projects, which must be required to demonstrate how they reduce VMT, and projects where city streets and state highways meet. 

In 2008, Washington State set a goal to reduce per capita VMT by 50% by 2050. This was followed by a report released 2023 that looked at strategies for how our state could meet these targets (the only time we did was during the first year or so of the pandemic). Unfortunately, since the report was released, there’s been little forward momentum and insufficient funding for meaningful VMT reduction work. 

HB 2134, which died in this legislative session, was a step in the right direction, giving Regional Transportation Planning Organizations in some of our more populated regions the ability to monitor the plans of local jurisdictions to ensure they are working towards meeting carbon pollution and VMT reduction targets. 

We’ve all seen plenty of well-intentioned climate, transportation and public health policies that look good on paper, but lack the political will or structure for implementation. For example, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) released the Climate Change Response Framework in 2023 , which set the goal to reduce the number of vehicle trips that use an internal combustion engine from 65% to 35% by 2030. We are nowhere near meeting that target, nor the projected increases for the percentage of transit, walking and biking trips defined in the SDOT framework. 

Re-allocating street space is a powerful tool that can be unlocked with a mandate to reduce VMT. But without a well-designed and implemented mandate, projects that maintain the status quo will continue to coast through our planning process. 

Here’s an example of how that works: a WSDOT-led Judkins Park workgroup planning a ramp reconfiguration design for I-90 and Rainier got stuck debating whether we could reduce the number of general purpose lanes on Rainier Avenue S. Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan cites 2045 Puget Sound Regional Council traffic projections that show that while projected population for the area increases and the percentage of car trips is reduced, the total volume of car trips will not decrease. 

Because of these projections, which are codified in our comp plan, WSDOT was arguing for the need to maintain all six lanes. As of February 5, WSDOT seems to be walking back from this assertion after models show that, with both current and reduced traffic volumes, four lanes should be sufficient. 

What’s clear from this process is that we’re designing our streets backwards. The expectation that we must move the same or more cars through this burgeoning area limits the possibilities of what is feasible for a redesign. Sound Transit is opening a new light rail station and developers are building dense housing around it. Instead of a design that prioritizes how the station area will grow into a community where people want to spend time, we are designing for anticipated car volumes. 

If we design a road for current car volumes, we are inducing those volumes to exist, and we’re actively working against our mode shift goals. Add a lane, and it will quickly fill with cars. Only by designing for reduced car capacity can we manifest a reduction in car volume. And only when we design for less car volume can we improve the experience of movement for everyone outside of vehicles. 

Fundamentally, we can’t ignore the context in which urban highways were built: often with the explicit intention of displacing non-White and low-income communities. Preserving infrastructure that maintains the current volumes of trucks and cars only perpetuates the public health costs of automobiles in cities, costs that continue to be disproportionately borne by low-income, non-White and immigrant residents. As communities across the U.S. are starting to take steps to address these harms, Seattle can be a leader in this space. 

In addition to a directive to reduce vehicle miles traveled, our mayor should convene a project team to take the lead on highway mitigation projects. We need safer and more frequent crossings on Lake City Way in North Seattle, safer and more comfortable crossings of the I-5 ramps at the 45th Street in the U District, and on Albro street in Georgetown. And we need to reconnect South Park by removing Highway 99 and rebuild Aurora Avenue to prioritize local, non-car movement. 

All of these will run into the same barrier we’ve encountered with the Judkins Park work: if vehicle volumes are to be maintained, then vehicle throughput has to be maintained, meaning our options to remove slip lanes, ban right turns on red or reduce the number of travel lanes won’t be allowed.

Highway lids are one tactic, and do decidedly make communities adjacent to highways less awful (my kid is fortunate, as advocates in the 1980s fought for a lid on I-90 in Judkins Park; his school sits on the lid instead of next to the freeway.) But lids are the proverbial band aid. By allowing the same volume of cars (and often more cars, as we saw in the Rose Corridor Project in Portland) to travel through the area, all the other harms of vehicle miles travelled still accrue. 

As Allison Sant notes in a recent Bloomberg CityLab piece about urban highways in New York: “While capping can have positive impacts in local communities, it will not limit the number of vehicles flowing through the neighborhood or fully mitigate their effects.” 

We have to tackle the public health harms that vehicles themselves create. Only then will we be able to have a city with vibrant public spaces and a robust transit network that everyone uses. That means mandating that all road projects must be designed to reduce the overall volume of car trips through and in our communities.

With a clear mayoral directive around achieving our VMT reduction goals, we can start looking seriously at other policies that would help us reach our targets. Where should we create bus-only lanes and traffic diverters to make transit, walking, riding and rolling more appealing travel options? Where can we pedestrianize public spaces, creating play streets and places for all of us to connect with our neighbors, especially in neighborhoods that are being upzoned to include more people?

The post Op-Ed: Nobody Wants to Live Next to a Highway first appeared on The Urbanist.

On top of $1.215 billion for highway and bridge maintenance and preservation, the new bonding would unlock $225 million for maintenance on deteriorating highway facilities like buildings and vehicle yards, and $100 million for maintenance work at Washington State Ferries.

An additional $100 million would go toward highway overhauls on the state’s “high risk corridors,” the surface highways where a disproportionate number of fatal and serious injury crashes take place. While that money wouldn’t be committed until the 2029-2031 biennium, it would double a $100 million that has already been committed to safety-related upgrades starting in 2027.

The backing for this new debt would come from a slate of funding sources that the legislature approved in 2025, including a 6-cent increase to the state gas tax, higher rental car fees, a luxury vehicle sales tax, and a 3% charge for credit card transactions on ferries. Along with a need to make up for declining fuel usage, those increases were largely approved to accommodate cost increases on a handful of highway expansion projects across the state, including the 520 bridge replacement project, the North Spokane Corridor, and the twin highway extensions between Seattle and Tacoma that have been dubbed the Puget Sound Gateway.

It’s highway projects like those that have caused basic highway maintenance to take a back seat in state transportation budgets over the past few decades, leading to the need to invest $8 billion over the next 10 years in order to keep the state system in a state-of-good repair. These new dollars will make a dent in that deficit, but at a cost of increased interest payments for future transportation budget writers.

“The supplemental budget focuses fundamentally on three core priorities: preservation and maintenance of our transportation system, safety on our system, and creating jobs across Washington state,” transportation committee chair Marko Liias (D-21st, Mukilteo) told reporters in a briefing minutes after the budget was posted online. “We are focused both on preservation maintenance of our state highways and our state bridges. We are also focused on preservation and maintenance of our state ferries, and then we’re also focused on dealing with the unprecedented damage caused by the flood event last fall, both at the state and local level.”

Debt service already eats up nearly 12% of the state’s transportation budget, more than the combined operating and capital budgets for the entire Washington State Ferries system. Despite the fact that the bill authorizing the new bonds is set to get a vote on Thursday in committee, as of Monday, the bill did not yet have a fiscal note attached to it that could give the public a sense of how much higher that number might potentially climb.

A plan to divert 0.1% of the state’s 6.5% sales tax into the transportation budget, also approved last year, will stay in place under the Senate’s proposal and be further established in state law by permanently dedicating a “significant portion” of that sales tax to state ferries. That tax diversion, which grabs funding that might otherwise fund schools and social services, has been causing heartburn among legislators.

The House budget, also released Monday, rejects the idea of issuing new debt. Without that new money, it includes much fewer sweeping changes to the budget the legislature approved last year, though it would add $770 million for maintenance and preservation leveraged using the state’s existing bonding capacity.

“We don’t need to authorize more bonds to invest more in preservation and maintenance; at least, not now,” House transportation chair Representative Jay Fey (D-27th, Tacoma) said in a release Monday. “By using existing bond capacity and smoothing funds across biennia, we are able to add $335 [million] to preservation and maintenance this biennium, and $435 [million] in 2027-29. Bonding can help deliver major infrastructure projects, but it must be used carefully. We need to look at funding decisions across the entire biennium and ensure we’re not over-committing future budgets.” 

After years of warnings from previous state transportation secretaries about budget writers’ lack of attention on preserving deteriorating highways, Ferguson has jumped on the issue since taking office in 2025. His office has seized on recent emergency closures like the shuttering of the Carbon River Bridge near Mount Rainer and the temporary closure of the White River bridge along State Route 410 to make the case that the state needs to be doing more to invest in basic maintenance, but Ferguson has not called for significantly reprioritizing spending decisions that have already been made.

The bond proposal allowed the new Governor to mostly evade that issue, while he has supported keeping highway expansion projects like the North Spokane Corridor on track during his first 14 months in office.

Transit funding is essentially a footnote in either chamber’s budget, though the legislature is advancing a proposal to allow Sound Transit to lean more heavily on debt as well, extending bond terms to 75 years for some of the agency’s most long-lasting assets.

The Senate proposal did ditch Ferguson’s idea of issuing another $1 billion in debt to accelerate construction on three new vehicle ferries for the state fleet. Liias defended the move as one that will allow the state to focus on delivery of the three new boats that are currently on order, when Ferguson’s proposal would have gotten six into the queue.

“When we look at this, between now and 2031, we feel like the budget has a lot of ferry construction work in it. As we come back in 2027, we’re going to have to talk about what steps we take beyond the first three [boats] but for the supplemental [budget] we’re focused on fully funding the first three vessels. That’s our priority,” Liias said. The governor presented a ten-year plan, so he did talk about those next vessels. I think I see a lot of merit in his proposal, but we want to sort of take more time on figuring out those next steps.”

Liias also defended a pivot away from supplemental passenger ferry service funding, which the legislature had invested in as the state ferry fleet rebounded from the depths of the pandemic. While temporary funding was provided to King County to help continue mid-day and Saturday service to Vashon Island, the Kitsap Transit fast ferry between Bremerton and Downtown Seattle no longer operates on Saturdays through the offseason.

“Because we’re now at full operating capability — obviously, occasionally there’s some hiccups when we have vessels that hit logs and things like that, but generally speaking — the system, absent that Sidney run, is at full domestic service,” Liias said. “And so for that reason, our commitment was that once we got full domestic service restored, that those sort of temporary relief mechanisms would go away. We’re continuing forward with that policy.”

Last year, the Mosquito Fleet Act, a bill from Representative Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island) that would have empowered local governments to take actions to fund passenger-only ferry systems on their own, died without getting a vote in Liias’s committee. Nance has been undertaking a second push to get that bill through, with a pivotal hearing this Friday back in the same committee.

Both the House and the Senate transportation committees are set to approve their respective budgets by the end of this week, with a conference committee to reconcile the two proposals almost certain to come after that. The final proposal will need a vote before the legislature adjourns for the year on March 12.

The post State Senate Signs Onto Billions of New Debt for Highway Upkeep first appeared on The Urbanist.

The impacts are everywhere. Travel times on I-5 north and south have ballooned. City streets are clogged with drivers inching toward on-ramps. And that congestion is spilling over into increasingly unhinged motorist behavior: racing through residential neighborhoods, driving into oncoming lanes, forcing their way into the front of lines, running red lights, and speeding to claw back lost time.

But did it have to be this way?

Seattleites overwhelmingly support policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce traffic violence, and lessen our dependence on cars. The multi-year maintenance project known as Revive I-5 should have been a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift trips away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward transit, walking, rolling, and biking.

We’ve done this before. During the weekslong Seattle Squeeze — also known as the Period of Maximum Constraint — SDOT ran educational campaigns and offered tools to help commuters “Flip Your Trip” and flatten the commute curve, while capacity was constrained with the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed for dismantling and the SR 99 tunnel yet to open. That educational effort worked because it acknowledged a simple truth: when driving becomes harder, many people will change how they travel — if they’re given clear information and viable alternatives.

This time, despite months of advance notice from WSDOT, many people returned to their normal routines after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend only to find themselves stunned by the congestion (a reminder: you’re not in traffic—you are traffic). WSDOT knew Revive I-5 would cause significant spillover effects yet did too little to seize the moment and catalyze lasting change. Strong leadership — and a true partnership with the City of Seattle — could have improved outcomes both immediately and over the long term.

We’re only two weeks in; there is still time to change course. Some opportunities include:

• Improved transit reliability through dedicated, expanded, and enforced transit-only lanes — ensuring buses are not stuck in the same congestion as single-occupancy vehicles.
• An increase in the downtown commercial parking tax as a proxy for congestion pricing.
• A widespread, proactive education campaign encouraging commuters to “Flip Your Trip.”
• Morning-only HOV access at select I-5 entrances, paired with real enforcement.
• Good To Go tolling at select I-5 on-ramps and along State Route 99.
• Widely distributed ORCA transit passes preloaded with a modest fare value.
• E-bike purchase vouchers for commuters who commit to reducing car trips (including cargo bikes for families).
• Large-scale automated enforcement to curb dangerous driving (blocking the box, private vehicles in transit-only lanes, speeding in school zones, etc.)
• Rapid deployment of proven traffic-calming tools—speed cushions, roundabouts, diverters — to slow speeds and keep cut-through traffic out of residential neighborhoods.
• Temporary crossing flags at locations where vehicle queues block sightlines at crosswalks.
• Clear encouragement for employers to expand incentives for transit use, active transportation, and flexible start/end times.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and it’s not meant to be. It’s a starting point — a way to reframe Revive I-5 not just as a construction headache, but as a rare chance to demonstrate what success could look like: fewer cars, safer streets, cleaner air, and a transportation system that works even when driving doesn’t.

The off-ramp from car dependence was right there. We still have two more years to turn this around.

The post Op-Ed: Revive I-5 Is the Missed Off-Ramp from Car Dependence first appeared on The Urbanist.

The post Sunday Video: What is ‘Carbrain’? first appeared on The Urbanist.

Ryan recently covered a myriad of housing bills working their way through Olympia. Bills allowing smaller elevators and scissor stairs could make midrise buildings more feasible to build. The hosts discussed the pros and cons of legislation allowing residential construction in commercial zones in mid-sized (and up) cities, which was requested by Governor Bob Ferguson, but perpetuates a corridor urbanism approach that focuses apartments near crash-prone, polluted highways.

The bills we referenced include:

• House Bill 1175 – Neighborhood cafes
• HB 1443 – Allows Mobile Dwelling Units on all Residences
• HB 2228 – Legalizing Scissor Stairs
• Senate Bill 5156 – Legalizing Smaller Elevators – Sightline Institute has a video explainer for more info.
• SB 6002 – Regulate Immigration Officials Access to License Plate Readers – Read Amy Sundberg’s article for more.
• SB 6026 – Requiring Mid-Size Cities to Allow Residential in all Commercial Zones.

Plus, Amy and Doug recounted their first interview with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson since she’s been installed in office. And the crew talks about their go-to parks for false spring reveling.

This episode of The Urbanist Podcast was edited by me. Episodes also air on KVRU 105.7 FM radio Thursdays at 4pm, on a once every two weeks cadence, give or take. Thank you to Crystal Fincher and Shannon Cheng of KVRU for their assistance producing our podcast.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan: Hello and welcome to the Urbanist Podcast, a show touching on the biggest headlines at The Urbanist, and offering a deeper look from the reporters 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. My name is Ryan Packer. I’m a contributing editor here at the Urbanist, and with me is the rest of our newsroom publisher, Doug Trumm 

Doug: Hey Ryan. Good to see you.  

Ryan: And reporter Amy Sundberg. 

Amy: Hey, everyone. Great to be here. 

Ryan: Every couple of weeks the Urbanist Podcast will recap the biggest headlines happening around the region and take you beyond the stories on the site. This week the Washington State Legislature convened for its whirlwind 60 day legislative session. 

There’s many topics they’re trying to tackle, the budget, transportation, housing, and policing among them. And we’re gonna go ahead and start running down what’s happening at the legislature, over the next few weeks as they try and get bills advanced, during their first big deadlines. 

Amy, what are the things that you’re tracking right now? 
 

[00:01:12] Amy: I am tracking so many things. I have this very long list. It’s not even a spreadsheet because I’m not organized. But one of the main things that legislatures are gonna be tackling this session is the budget, because they do have a budget deficit. So there are several bills around that effort to balance the budget. 

Of course, Governor Ferguson has come out in favor of the Millionaire Tax, which we talked about last time, which would be an income tax on income over a million dollars. So it would not affect 99 point something percent of Washingtonians. It seems like he is less favorable towards other new revenue ideas. But that is not gonna stop some of the Democrats from bringing them forward. 
 

[00:02:03] Ryan: Yeah, I know there’s a proposal from Shaun Scott, one of the most progressive legislators in the Democratic caucus, in the house in terms of a statewide payroll tax similar to the Seattle Jumpstart Tax. Have you seen that get any early attraction in the first few days, Amy? 

[00:02:20] Amy: I haven’t heard much about it, although it does have many sponsors, which is promising. I know that Governor Ferguson said he was, quote, not a fan end quote of this idea of a statewide payroll tax. But, Representative Scott has the idea that a lot of the money that this would generate would go towards backfilling some of the expenses that the state will incur because of the Trump administration’s changing of policy. 

So it would help with education. It would help with healthcare, and other really important priorities like that. Another interesting thing is, as a Seattleite of course, is that if we had a statewide payroll tax, I don’t know that we’ve seen a lot of capital flight from Seattle, but if it were statewide, of course no one would have any incentive to leave Seattle and go elsewhere in the state, which I think is an interesting thought. 
 

[00:03:20] Ryan: Doug, you’ve been watching The Urbanist ramp up its legislative coverage over the years. How is this session working out so far. I know it’s only day, day three, but in terms of past sessions and what, what are you tracking? 
 

[00:03:33] Doug: Yeah, it feels like a little bit of a odd session, especially for a short session. They have a lot of budget problems to dig out from under, with a multi-billion dollar deficit. Normally they’re dealing with the budget in the long session, but when this problems spill over to the next year, then they’re still dealing with that. 

So it seems to have robbed a little bit of the ambition, but obviously if they get their framework for a millionaires income tax, that would be a big accomplishment, even if it’s something that doesn’t start collecting money until 2029. We’ve never had an income tax in our state and it’s starting to become very difficult to grapple with some of our budget issues without one. 

But there’s still obviously going to be some bills moving. This week we had a piece from you that was laying out okay, like, here’s the housing bills that are moving. And I thought that did a really good job of, showing there’s still impactful bills here, more on the margins or on the edges. It’s not like the big sweeping zoning bills that we saw over the previous years. But it’s these nitty gritty bills that will hopefully help builders actually take advantage of that zoning. So we saw a number of those bills focused on more affordable building methods. And that includes scissor stairs, elevator reform, and things like that, that could help, you know, make sure that there’s not like these unforced errors here, that makes building untenable. 

[00:05:05] Ryan: Yeah, I think what I said on the site in my legislative preview was they tackled the elephant in the room, which is our inclusionary zoning and our parking mandates, and things like that. And now we’re getting into the, the thousand paper cuts that make housing more expensive, you know, requirement to have two sets of stairs and you can’t make them consolidated together like with a scissor stair building. 

It’s very wonky, very wonky stuff. The elevator issue got a lot of attention last year in terms of the ways that the US isn’t a big outlier. The U.S. and Canada are a big outlier in terms of requiring every elevator to accommodate a, a lay down stretcher, which paradoxically leads to a lot of buildings being built without elevators or without redundant elevators. 

So when one breaks down, you have to use the stairs. And so I think that one’s gonna get a lot of attention. I think it generated a lot of controversy among the firefighter community and the very powerful elevator unions, which people don’t really, I think, know too much about, that there are very, very small number of unions that control who’s able to maintain all of the elevators in the US and it’s a little bit of a mafia in terms of the very controlled situations and the standards that are in place. We talked to the bill sponsor. He thinks he’s gonna take a little bit of a retreat of a position, kick it over to the State Building Code Council to make the really big decisions, which I think is gonna disappoint some people who are hoping for bolder action on that. 
 

But I think it ultimately might be the only way that we’re gonna be able to get that across the finish line. 
 

[00:06:41] Doug: Yeah, and it is super wonky. The elevator reform bill is Senate Bill 5 1 5 6. For those who wanna track its progress or weigh in on, on the state site, we’ll include a link in the podcast notes. But you know, the elevator pitch, see what I did there, for that bill is that by requiring such large elevators, we basically get no elevators, in many, many smaller projects in particular where they may not be required. 

In Europe we see, and in Asia, for that matter, we see buildings going in, they have these smaller elevators and they actually have them. So there’s a much higher number of elevators per capita in those places. So we’ve regulated ourselves into an absurd outcome where, we want these elevators, but because we’re requiring gold plated version that fits a a large stretcher, we’re not getting it. 

So it’s hard to argue with and maybe this new approach from Solomon will bear more fruit where it’s not dictating from the state legislature, but punting to the, the building council to, to do, so hopeful for that. And then the scissor stair bill, if you’re wanting to look that up, is, is House Bill 2228. 

And similar reasons there. By requiring not more efficient stairway design, we’re just using more of our building space for hallways and stairs instead of housing. And obviously if we’re in a housing crisis, that that should be our priority. 
 

[00:08:04] Ryan: Yeah, and there was one more splashy bill that the governor actually proposed, got put forward through Senator Emily Alvarado outta West Seattle. It would essentially require all major cities, I think over 30,000 in population to allow residential uses on commercial properties. So, strip malls, big box stores that are underutilized would be required to let developers build multifamily and they couldn’t require ground floor retail. So that’s a little bit of an interesting bill. I’d be curious for your thoughts on that, Doug and Amy, in terms of where we’re encouraging housing development. 

I think it’s a little interesting. A lot of the capacity, like in Seattle is already in these places. We’re not really seeing people build there. Aurora is pretty much zoned for residential, but it’s not becoming… people aren’t really redeveloping these big sites to build housing now. It’s not clear to me whether this is gonna be a big change. And there’s the issue of a lot of these areas that are zoned for commercial zoning are along highways and in the areas of the cities where you wouldn’t necessarily wanna live. And so there’s an environmental justice aspect to this. 

I kind of see this as one element of this very popular idea right now, coming up in certain elements of state government, which is like corridor urbanism, where we’re gonna only change the areas of the cities that people don’t really like and kinda leave the nice neighborhoods alone. 
 

[00:09:43] Amy: I think it’s really tough too, because as you said, it is an environmental issue and it’s a health issue, right? In terms of pollution, and what that does to the body over time or as a child. And in terms of desirability where people would prefer to live, where they can afford to live, are they pushed into less desirable locations because of what they can afford? 

And then at the same time, we have so little housing, right? And so I think there’s the, the push to try to get more housing however is possible, even if it means instituting this corridor urbanism. So I think a big question is how, how do you push back on that? Or how do you make sure that it’s balanced so that you allow as much housing as possible, but allow it also in more places. 
 

[00:10:34] Doug: Yeah, I, I think it’s necessary but not sufficient. We, we just need to put housing in places where people actually wanna live, has got to be more of our policy going forward. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do this when we’re in the midst of a crisis, and some of these strip mall areas and commercial corridors, hopefully aren’t quite so polluted road, backwater places. 

But many of them are. And the 30,000 cutoff is interesting ’cause many of the places that come to mind for me are in those smaller cities, the Mercer Islands of the world. And they won’t be affected by the bill. At least, unless they change that population threshold. 

The corridor’s approach is something that’s popular with Challenge Seattle and Chris Gregoire, the former governor of Washington, someone who’s, who’s very close with the governor, someone the governor said he has on speed dial, and is a great conduit for him. So, he jokes that housing, housing, housing are his top three priorities and he’s trying to do things and then this was a requested bill from him. 

But, it still seems like a bill that’s maybe a little behind the times. It’s something we still need, but we gotta be thinking about the next steps about how to get housing off of those busy corridors where people don’t actually wanna breathe the air or have their kids play outside. 
 

[00:11:51] Ryan: Yeah, or just get better at converting those corridors into places where people are safer and wanna spend more time. I think that’s a big question about this. We recently wrote about a proposal for State Route 99 through Snohomish County, which is gonna be subject to the new Complete Streets mandate, that was passed in 2021, requiring biking and pedestrian facilities to be evaluated for state highways. 

And so, if you’re gonna be creating a place that has bike lanes and transit lanes and is a little bit more of a pleasant corridor, but I haven’t seen necessarily a political will behind more intense treatments to actually make these places more walkable neighborhoods. 
 

[00:12:36] Doug: Yeah, I live three blocks off of Aurora and it makes a huge difference. Granted, a benefit of there being a hill there as well. But, I think if we’re only focused on those first few blocks, that’s not gonna really be that desirable of housing, that healthy of housing. And your point about these strip mall conversions being trickier than people think is well taken, ’cause there’s plenty of those on the map that we’ve been hearing about forever but haven’t fully happened. Whether, whether Northgate, which I think will happen eventually, or Totem Lake, some of these big malls that, that haven’t been converted yet. Even though, you know, there’s been huge civic dreams and big numbers in their planning schemes counted on for those. 
 

[00:13:16] Ryan: Amy, I know there’s a number of public safety bills that you’re tracking. What are the top ones that, that people should know about? 
 

[00:13:24] Amy: Yeah, one of the things I am interested in is whether the state is finally gonna move on the public defender problem, which we’ve reported on in the past. And basically there just aren’t enough public defenders in the state of Washington and they’re also working very long hours. They’re not very well paid. And so the State Supreme Court basically made new caseload standards to try to help make it more tenable. But those caseload standards mean they have to hire more lawyers, so it’s going to cost more. And Washington State is unusual in that right now the state doesn’t really contribute to the cost of public defense, which is a constitutional right. 

So the question the last few years has been, is the state gonna step forward and take some of that expense on, of course, with a budget deficit, nobody wants to. So, it’s an interesting question. I know Senator Jamie Peterson said last week at the state legislature preview for media that he was more interested in not having the state get directly involved in funding, but instead lift the property tax cap for counties, which is something that we’ve also talked about before. So that basically counties would be able to raise more money through property taxes in order to pay for public defense. So it’s gonna be interesting to see which avenue they choose to take, or if they kick it down the road another year, which is what they’ve been doing so far. 

Another bill that I’ve been following and will be following closely is the automated license plate reader bill. It is sponsored by Senator Yasmine Trudeau. It is trying to establish some rules around the usage of these license plate reader cameras, that we have been covering for the past year or so, that have a lot of data privacy issues. 

The most concerning reporting I think over the last year has been that we’ve been able to tell that many law enforcement agencies have been sharing their data with ICE, and ICE-related immigration activities. And also there was a report of the data being shared for a Texas law enforcement agency was looking for someone who had been seeking an abortion. So, data had been shared in that case as well. So, we, we know about these few cases, but in general we think that probably there’s a lot more going on that we don’t know about. This bill is trying to put some safeguards around the data. It’s still in progress. It’s supposed to have its first hearing towards the end of January. 

So, there are still some outstanding issues as to what the bill will actually say, but it’s something that I’m following very closely. 

And that’s SB 6 0 0 2, I believe, if people wanna track that. And I’ll be doing a deep dive analysis of exactly what’s in that bill and you know, also how it could be made stronger and better. 
 

[00:16:34] Ryan: And so obviously that bill is a direct response to what we’re seeing happening in the federal government, in terms of ICE behavior. Are there any other bills that you see the legislature putting forward to just directly respond to the pretty egregious behavior that we’re seeing at the federal level right now?  
 

[00:16:53] Amy: Yeah. The other one that’s getting a lot of press is the mask ban for law enforcement bill, which the governor has spoken about many times. Like I’ve seen people seem in general to, to have a lot of enthusiasm for it. I think it’s already had its first hearing. I don’t see any reason why it can’t be passed relatively quickly. 

I’m a little bit, maybe less. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a good bill or even a good idea, but I feel like we don’t know exactly what effect the bill will have in practice. And it seems kind of insufficient and I’m a little bit worried that we’ll have a quick pass of this bill and then not do anything else. 

But there’s a similar bill that passed in California, and there’s currently legal action around that. So, once that case resolves, we’ll have a better idea of what this bill would actually do in practice here in Washington. But right now it’s kind of in limbo in terms of whether or not it would be able to be enacted, how it would be enforced, who would enforce it, right? 

Who’s gonna go up to ICE agents and be like, actually, you can’t be wearing the mask. Would it be local law enforcement? Because I think that could be a problem. 
 

[00:18:07] Ryan: Yeah, I know Portland is also considering a bill like this right now. But it sounds like you think it might be a little bit more symbolic than anything. 
 

[00:18:15] Amy: I mean, we’ll see, I think it really depends on the court case. And yes, it does feel a little symbolic. And, like I said, I don’t think it’s a bad bill. I do think that there’s some value in, in stating one’s beliefs firmly. If, if that’s what the bill ends up achieving, I don’t think that’s nothing.

But I also would like to see more urgency from our lawmakers. And I don’t want anyone to be lulled into a false sense of security. 
 

[00:18:44] Ryan: Great. Well, like we said, there’s only 60 days in the session, which is very short. You know, I think it is clear that there are no budget years anymore. Every year is a budget year with everything that’s going on in the federal government. So it’s interesting to see that we’re just kinda going with the flow in terms of the 60 day session. 

The governor could call an emergency session anytime he wanted to, but we’re giving ourselves a very condensed timeline to get these very big proposals across the finish line. I think the first deadline is early February for committee bills. And so we’ll be tracking all of those and seeing what ends up falling by the wayside due to that, that short timeline. 
 

[00:19:25] Doug: Yeah. Ryan. One bill I was curious about circling back to housing a little bit, was the mobile dwelling units bill, House Bill 1443. I know that’s getting pushback from the Association of Washington Cities, which they often push back on housing capacity bills. But, do you think it has an actual shot, and how big of impact could that be? 
 

[00:19:46] Ryan: I think that bill definitely has a lot of potential. It’s a holdover from last year, so it’s already been kind of considered a little bit. So we might see some, some clear movement, since people already know what they’re, they’re dealing with. I think it’s seen as a very easy win in terms of letting people do what they want with their property. 

If they want to build a very cheap relative to a lot of other types of housing, essentially accessory dwelling unit, except it’s on wheels. But like you said, there’s some concern, mobile homes fall in a different category of tenant protections in Washington, and so it’s not clear who’s in charge of ensuring these things are up to code, whether they can be inspected, how cities are able to deal with these if there are problems. And so I think that’s an interesting element. 

Over the past couple years we have seen opposition from AWC to a lot of bills that wasn’t able to stop it. You know, parking reform was pretty opposed by them. Middle housing at one point was, was not really their favorite bill, but they, they were able to get across the finish line. So I’m interested to see whether they kind of are able to put their foot down and say this is too much for us. 
 

[00:20:58] Doug: And is it mostly a age in place expand your family kind of bill? Or is it being framed as helping with the homelessness crisis, like getting cheap units out the door quickly? 
 

[00:21:08] Ryan: I think it’s more, more just like giving people different options. I don’t see people proposing like a, you know, 50 unit MDU development or something like that. It’s like if you have a backyard and you want to be able to do something cheaply and efficiently with a utility hookup, not a full sewer connection, it’s a good option. 
 

[00:21:29] Doug: Well, another big development early this year that has massive budget implications for Washington State is the interstate bridge replacement project, which is an I-5 bridge to between Portland and Vancouver, Washington that has been on the wishlist of highway builders and lawmakers for decades here. 

And, you know, it felt like it was inevitable at a certain point, but then it turns out that there’s new budget estimates that are way larger than initially thought. Ryan, you broke this story, at least in this region. I know City Observatory got their hands on the data, but walk us through what, what happened here? 
 

[00:22:10] Ryan: Yeah, so this is essentially the biggest highway project in Pacific Northwest history. It is framed as a bridge replacement, but the scope has long been more than that. Five miles of expansion of I-5 to add two lanes, which they’re calling auxiliary lanes, seven interchanges and ramps and all this, as well as, you know, a bike walk path and a light rail extension of the existing yellow line, a MAX line. 

So, this has been slowly advancing. The two bridges that carry I-5 over the river are very old. You know, everyone’s concerned about what’s gonna happen. But they’ve been trying to jam all these different elements into this project. It was already the most expensive highway project in history, and now the cost estimates are anywhere from $13.5 to $19 billion, depending on whether they’re able to do a fixed span instead of a movable span bridge that lets boat traffic through. 

Washington and Oregon had already put forward a billion each for this. And they had gotten some pretty big federal grants. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell teed up a grant program in the 2021 infrastructure bill that was essentially just for this project, really big bridge projects, giving them a very large amount of money. 

But, even with that, they only have around 6 billion assembled and that includes tolls. And so, there’s not a whole lot of extra spare change in either states’ budget, especially Oregon, which is in really dire straits right now in terms of where their transportation budget is. They’re probably gonna repeal their transportation package that passed last year, which was very modest. 

And so have start over from square one, and so a lot of people are questioning whether this project is gonna be able to move forward at all. 
 

[00:24:03] Amy: One thing that really struck me about this story was that it only came to light that the budget had ballooned so much, because of a public records disclosure request that somebody made. What was going on with that? Why? Why the secrecy. 
 

[00:24:19] Ryan: Well, to provide the benefit of the doubt answer. It’s a very large project. There’s like dozens of different individual elements that they have to cost out and do their rigorous analysis. I think even if a final number wasn’t available, the fact that you’re in the 13- to 15-billion-dollar range is like something you should give people a heads up on. 

They spend around two years just being like, ‘we’re gonna have these cost estimates soon, but costs are going up, so you should be prepared for that.’ And without this, we were gonna probably go through another legislative session without this information. And so it’s a big issue to get your head around. 

And like I said, it’s unclear whether the two states are gonna be able to come up with any additional money for this. 
 

[00:25:07] Amy: Saying that they can’t find any additional money is, is there enough money to replace the bridge even and just take out everything else, or what would be another way forward? 
 

[00:25:19] Ryan: Well, that’s what Jake Fey, the chair of the House Transportation Committee in Washington told me last week. 
 

[00:25:26] Doug: And that’s a pretty big step for Fey, I believe, because he’s been one of the bigger proponents for keeping these highway expansion projects on the dockets and framing them as necessary even when they do sneak in some this expansion, if I’m remembering correctly. 
 

[00:25:43] Ryan: So Fey said that they have enough money to replace the bridge, knock the old ones down, just do a very minimal replacement project, but that’s not what the scope of this project is, and it hasn’t been for many years. And so they are trying to reuse the environmental documentation from the previous iteration of this project, which was pretty much the same thing, 10 lanes. 

It’s not clear to me at least whether you can just pull that out and just do this one little part. The light rail has gotten a lot of attention. It got called on Antifa Superhighway during the last congressional race in that district, which was the famous Joe Kent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez race. 

I think it’s part of the project. You have a high capacity transit component. They looked at doing bus rapid transit. They settled on light rail, but like that is in there. So the question of whether you just phase that, do it later. It seems like you’re gonna have to redo your environment documentation, and we’ve been working on this for years. And it’s just not clear whether we’re gonna have to derail the entire thing. I don’t, I don’t see how we get to. And, the intense irony is that for years transportation advocates in Portland mostly, as well as some on the Washington side, sustainable transportation advocates, I should say, have been saying: ‘right size this, it’s too bloated.’ 

And now we’re at the 11th yard line and only because we are having a huge cost overrun are, they kind of saying: ‘Hey, maybe we need to right-size this.’ 
 

[00:27:17] Doug: Yeah, it, it only when their back is against the wall, for sure. I think the light rail’s a little disappointing in what they had envisioned. It sticks to the freeway, but obviously for multimodal advocates, it’s at least a foot in the door to be like, well now we have the crossing. 

We can look at expanding it later or figuring a way to maximize its value later, even if it’s not ideal places for transit-oriented development. 

I do think that in the longer term, there’s all these dreams about high speed rail, and this process has not inspired hope in that, maybe if we had started from scratch, we would be talking about how to make a high speed rail ready bridge instead of half-ass light rail ready bridge. 

Because it doesn’t feel like a huge win to really have. Relying on that old environmental study is also leaving you with 1990s or 2000s priorities. Now the dream’s a lot bigger, and this bridge isn’t gonna solve the I-5 transportation pinch in any stretch of the imagination, even with those extra lanes through Clark County. But high speed rail would be something that would scale and would meet travel demand in this corridor to a large extent. So yeah, they have to figure that out. 

And, the other thing that really struck me about this story was the extent that the US Coast Guard, again, is creating huge roadblocks to local projects that are really important. We saw this come up in 2022 when Sound Transit was trying to deal with the Ballard Link light rail planning. They wanted to do a bridge over Salmon Bay to get to Ballard. And then the Coast Guard comes in and says, you need 205 feet of vertical clearance because it came out later through our reporting that they wanted to make sure super yacht industry had a, a good foothold in Seattle, I guess in the other side of the bridge. 
 

That’s why you need whopping 205 feet of clearance even when the George Washington Bridge, which carries 99, was what sound transit had been working with as the amount of clearance they could provide. And you could do that with a fixed span, but it becomes astronomically more expensive to try to do 205 feet of clearance with a fixed span or if you’re adding a movable bridge, it’s also expensive. 

That’s what we see here with the Columbia River being a major thoroughfare for freight traffic and they’re the Coast Guard’s pushing them to go higher and that’s adding a lot to the budget. 
 

[00:29:45] Ryan: Yeah, I mean, it’s part of a larger issue where our standards are totally different than they were during the era when we were building a lot more things. Like, I just think of, speaking of light rail Ballard Link, the sizes of the stations for Westlake, something like five times as big as the existing Westlake Station, even though, we already have the exact same type of thing that we already would wanna build, but we can’t build it that small because the standards are totally different now 40, 50 years later. 

Exactly the same way that the bridges that exist now, you couldn’t build those today. And so in part, transit and highway projects are both subject to this very different environment for permitting things. And, you know, I’m happy to say that it’s slowing down a highway project that was gonna make the climate worse, but it’s kind of an across the board problem. 
 

[00:30:37] Amy: Well, and right now it might be preventing a highway project, but clearly it’s also preventing transit projects, right? Light rail or high speed rail that I think all three of us agree we really wanna see more of. 
 

[00:30:50] Ryan: A hundred percent. I think it’s a big reason why the costs for transit in the US are so much higher than they are elsewhere. 
 

[00:30:56] Doug: And the plans don’t connect either, right? Like you have this nice renaissance, or whatever you wanna call it, in downtown Vancouver. And they have this nice development and there’s this nice waterfront and then they wanna put a giant freeway bridge and interchange right on the edge of it. Like that’s not gonna help their downtown. That’s not going to promote more housing wanting to be there, more people to be in that housing. , So, figuring out how do you make your vision for your urban development match your transportation network? It feels like we let highways get whatever they want, and then everything else has to fit in between in the gaps. 

[00:31:32] Ryan: Yeah. Legislators are now gonna be forced to deal with this. I’m tracking to see what they’re saying about this. I don’t ultimately expect any decision to get made because it’s in a holding pattern. But I’ll be curious to see where things go from here. 
 

[00:31:50] Doug: Yeah, I would be surprised if they leave this in limbo, because one thing we’ve seen out of the playbook of these mega projects for highways is the project’s never done. It’s only broken into segments or put on pause and, and there’s this air of inevitability around them. 

So I don’t think they’re gonna admit defeat, but they might have to put it on the back burner for a while. 
 

[00:32:10] Ryan: Yeah, I mean, one of the things about this project is I’m worried about starting construction and then ending up running outta money in the middle of it. I don’t think people really realize how long the timeline is for this. They’re not expected to get done with this thing until the mid 2030s. 

And it’s gonna be a very long time of construction if they end up starting this. So what happens if, even if they’re able to assemble funding and then costs go up even more, and they’re in the middle of this 12-year project? I think we saw that with the 520 bridge in Seattle a little bit, but it’s not really sustainable for us to keep working on the same project over and over again in terms of our budget issues. 
 

[00:32:55] Doug: Yeah, it reminds me of how that the Tacoma section of I-5 the joke is it’s always under construction and they’ve finally got that to a place recently where everyone’s like, oh, there’s not construction there anymore. That could very much be the future for Clark County too, where it just becomes one of these 20 year stop and start projects. 
 

[00:33:12] Ryan: Well, let’s turn our attention to back to the city of Seattle. Doug and Amy, you guys got to do a pretty cool thing and go to City Hall and talk to the new mayor, Katie Wilson, for an exclusive 45-minute interview. How did that go? 
 

[00:33:27] Doug: Yeah, that was pretty fun. I don’t remember being up on the seventh floor of City Hall before. Bruce Harrell didn’t invite me, Jenny Durkan didn’t invite me. I don’t know how many more invites we’ll get, but it was cool to see. We got to go out in the little balcony there on the seventh floor and look down on the city. 

And, definitely was a cool feeling to see that coming together, to see some new opportunities emerging. Obviously there’ll be a lot of work to actually seize those opportunities, but yeah, it definitely felt like both energy and also they got a lot of balls up in the air and they’re, they’re starting to try to juggle them all. Amy was that your impression as well? 
 

[00:33:58] Amy: Yeah, there’s a lot going on here in Seattle. And I think it’s a heavy lift just to assemble a team and get started on things. That’s what we’re gonna be seeing is that beginning to get things moving, but it remains to be seen exactly how long that will take. 
 

[00:34:16] Doug: Yeah, we’re sorry you missed it. Ryan, you came down with the flu that week and, and you were supposed to be there as well, but I’m sure there’ll be more opportunities. 
 

[00:34:23] Ryan: Yeah, I was sad to miss it. I think a lot of people are watching for the Wilson Administration’s first moves. I think some people are surprised we haven’t seen an executive order or a big press conference yet. And you know, the comparisons to Zohran Mamdani are kind of hard not to draw. Obviously it’s a much bigger city government over there in New York City. But there have been a lot of policy rollouts. And so, what is your read? Do you think people are being a little too impatient? Or what? 
 

[00:34:54] Amy: I think things take the time they take. So, I think if, if people feel impatient, that’s understandable because there’s a lot of urgency right now. There’s a lot of important things that need to be done. But also I think giving someone a little grace at the beginning of their term is fair. 

I take your point too, that New York City is very different than Seattle. Just for starters, it’s a lot bigger, not just the city government, but just in general. I don’t wanna have expectations that are correlated to where we’re at. 
 

[00:35:25] Doug: Yeah, I think it’s too early to draw any firm conclusions. I definitely think that they have some pretty big aspirations, and maybe our focus on some of those big items rather than having some splashy thing that they can do in the first few days. And they have the state of the city speech next month, and I think that’ll be when we start seeing the big stuff really getting pushed, hopefully. And, maybe it’s still ducks in a row time. But, yeah, some interesting stuff if you read between the lines, and we asked about Wilson’s vision for SDOT and both in SDOT and at, the Seattle Police Department, she’s working with people who had already been there. She did remove the SDOT director, Adiam Emery and replaced her with another senior staffer who was actually over at the Waterfront, Angela Brady, as we talked about, I think in a previous episode. But, we asked her about that, and she stressed the value of continuity, especially in a time of wanting to prep for the World Cup and wanting to get some things done immediately, not wanting a period of upheaval.

And her reasons are similar for keeping Shon Barnes, not wanting to rock the boat when hiring is finally recovered for the police department and wanting to keep some things moving and collaborations with the civilian CARE department. So that’s kind of a gamble that some of those folks who’ve been there a long time will, will come over to her side of things, and can actually carry out culture change even if they’ve been in that culture for a while. 

I think it could work, but obviously there’s no guarantees. What are you feeling about the SDOT approach Ryan? 
 

[00:36:55] Ryan: Yeah, the fact that she moved so quickly to replace Adiam Emery, who, to be clear, was an interim director, never got confirmed by Bruce Harrell as an intentional choice, you know, I think was a clear signal of the importance of that department. But she did face a limited universe of people who would be able to start that job on day one. 

You mentioned that Angela Brady was at the waterfront, but she had been at SDOT before that and, and the Office of Waterfront works very closely with SDOT on a lot of projects. You know, it’s, it’s standalone department, but it is kind of within SDOT in some ways. 

So I think, she’s clearly signaling that she has big intentions for that department. But I’m waiting to see what the fruit of that is. We’ve got this huge transportation levy, a lot of investments that were already in the pipeline, and so it remains to be seen what her stamp of change looks like. 

I’m watching these big Vision Zero corridors and whether SDOT feels like they have a little bit more of a someone who has their back when it comes to making bold changes on these dangerous streets and not being afraid to reallocate space. But so far it’s only been a few weeks. So we don’t really have a whole lot of stuff to go off of. 

Doug, I’m curious for your reaction to her talking about Sound Transit. 
 

[00:38:17] Doug: Yeah, people seemed struck by the fact that she really emphasized regionalism in that answer. When I asked her about, how are you gonna approach these pretty weighty issues that Sound Transit. They’re deeply over budget on some of their long-term aspirations for expansion. 

And also it’s just generally the operations budget’s costing more than they thought. So they have to get their house in order. No time for her to have an easy first few months here in her Sound Transit board gig. She’s immediately gonna have to go into what they’re calling the “enterprise initiative” to solve their long-term financial woes. But yeah, I think focusing on regionalism is something that is somewhat a break from her predecessor Bruce Harrell, who he was kind of a hands off as a member somewhat. 

He didn’t have the most sterling attendance record, or he was there, but he didn’t say much. But there were some meetings where he really would have a big impact. That came up a few times, but one of them was like, once he had lost the primary, he suddenly wanted to be more out front on Sound Transit issues. 

And that might’ve happened anyways, because that was sort of the topic of the day was how to find budget savings on the various lines, including Ballard Link and West Seattle Link. And that’s a politically fraught topic, but he had this press conference where he threw down the gauntlet and said: ‘we’re not cutting our projects. They’re too important.’ 

And, it wasn’t really regionalism that came across from that press conference. So, that seems to be one big difference. Katie Wilson is still saying: ‘well, we’re not really wanting to cut our projects. We don’t wanna cut any of the projects.’ But more of a collaborative olive branch approach where you’re saying well, let’s figure it out together rather than all back into our corner and beat our chest about how important our particular projects are and how great our cities are. But just look more broadly than that. 

[00:40:00] Amy: I’ve been really interested in the debate about whether we should have one tunnel or two tunnels for light rail. So I was really interested that Katie Wilson just came right out and said that she thinks we need to tunnels, and it’s because of reliability of the system, right. Which certainly is a thing that we’re seeing in terms of the whole light rail kind of shuts down and you have to take a shuttle bus from one station to another station. 

It’s often on the weekends and so people are trying to go out and have fun, see their friends, whatever. And it can be really difficult or time consuming to use the transit network. So I thought it was interesting that she didn’t hedge at all, so she seemed pretty clear as to where she stood on that issue. 
 

[00:40:47] Doug: Yeah, she didn’t need time to get up to speed on that one. And that you’re right. That was a super interesting answer. And it’s very top of mind for riders right now because we are in the midst of a period of several weekend closures. The second weekend of January was one of those closures and it’s very disruptive. 

And if you thought you were gonna count on light rail suddenly, the agency itself says it might take a half hour longer, maybe less if you figure out a bus route that’s an alternative. But, you know, it’s disruptive and conceivably if you had two tunnels, you wouldn’t have to suffer through that quite so badly. 
 

[00:41:18] Ryan: Yeah, well the board set aside the two tunnel issue in December, right before Katie’s set to go on the board. I think we saw an interesting tactic from Dan Strauss who’s gonna be sitting on the board with Katie, more of a, I think a tactical decision, political, if you will, in terms of his framing of the second tunnel, which was, he used the analysis that Sound Transit produced to say: ‘Ballard would be fine without the second tunnel. We can get to Westlake connect to the rest of the system. The second tunnel is actually for all of you guys, for Everett, for Tacoma, for the Eastside, in terms of providing that redundancy. And so it was a little bit of a: Hey, if you guys think this is so important, then maybe you should pay for more of it. 

I thought that was pretty interesting. I don’t know how far it’s gonna go. The second tunnel is very unusual in that it is paid for by everybody proportionally to the riders that are expected to use it. Ballard has the biggest amount of riders. It’s the most useful line in the ST3 program. But it is beneficial to all the systems. And so it’s an interesting way to calculate that because ridership is what you want. So it’s like kind of punishing the area of the system that is expected to generate the most ridership a little bit, a little bit backwards, I think. 

So I don’t know if they’re gonna rethink that, but it does set up an interesting conversation about the payment. I don’t know that we’re gonna have a full reconsideration of the actual second tunnel issue. Now that we’ve kind of set it aside. 
 

[00:42:55] Amy: One of the other things that’s gonna be really important for Mayor Wilson is standing up housing, in order to try to alleviate some of the homelessness problem. And, you know, she made a campaign promise to stand up 4,000 new units by the end of her first term. So 4,000 units in four years. 

But she also is working against a clock, because of the World Cup that is coming in June and wanting to have a bunch of extra units, so that she can move people off the streets into safe and, more humane housing, as opposed to just sweeping them elsewhere in the city. 
 

[00:43:35] Doug: Yeah, and she was very careful, as she has been in other interviews, not to set a specific number beyond the 4,000 for her whole four year term, which is probably good politics. I mean, we saw with Mayor Harrell what happens when you set a target and then don’t meet it, and then you just start making up new definitions of words to try to cover up the fact you didn’t do it, such as like, ‘well, we identified those units. We didn’t build them, but we identified.’ And that’s how he approached his 2,000 goal for his first year. But yeah, I mean, it’s a bold goal. Interesting that they both set similar goals. She actually doubled his goal, granted giving herself more time. 

But it’ll be a big lift. She would stress that it was her number one priority, so she’s probably gonna move heaven and earth to try to make it happen. That wasn’t the only World Cup preparations though she had in mind. 
 

[00:44:22] Ryan: Yeah, so that’s the emergency immediate housing moves. But there’s also the long-term zoning issues and whether she’s gonna be able to break Seattle’s longstanding zoning dichotomy of the single family home zones separated out from the apartment districts. 

Doug, what was your kind of read on how she’s gonna be approaching the city’s zoning plan? 
 

[00:44:47] Doug: Yeah, she mentioned that she wanted to lean on the supplemental environmental impact statement, which is something that emerged as something they need to do because they kept adding stuff to the plan late in the process. So, you know, she’s taking advantage of this phased approach where they’re gonna keep the stuff that’s already in process and has the environmental work, they’re gonna keep that moving. But, they’re gonna try to use the, the fact they have to do this supplemental EIS to add some new stuff on there, where it won’t impact the timeline for the other things. 

So that was interesting. Definitely something she said in the campaign trail. And there’s a few different points in her interview where she said, ‘well, yeah, my position’s still the same.’ So, she’s definitely seems like someone who wants to hold to her campaign pledges. And just ’cause she’s gotten office and she’s seeing where things face obstacles doesn’t mean she’s gonna give up on them. 

I think that’ll probably mean things like wider corridors along transit corridors where we’re allowing apartments or at least larger buildings than are allowed there currently. It could mean more neighborhood centers, which is our term for these new kind of mini urban villages that we’re adding around the city. 

And Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rink proposed eight additional ones. And, that seems like something that Wilson would support, although she didn’t say that specifically in this interview. Those are things that were told they had to go through the supplemental EIS, and it sounds like they wanna do that and maybe more. But I know, Rico Quirindongo, the director of the planning department of the city recently spoke to this issue too, and I know you were tracking that, Ryan. So what did he say about this as well? 
 

[00:46:24] Ryan: Yeah, I think they were kind of on the same page. Very methodical approach to getting things lined up. They have a pretty packed work plan, on top of anything that the mayor would want to add on their plate. City council kind of overloaded the buffet during the comp plan process. 

And they had to go back and say: ‘we’re gonna have to do a lot more review of these things.’ Parking, trees. Of course we have to do a lot of tree work always. And then the neighborhood centers and things like that. And so I think a lot of people have been pushing Katie to reopen the comp plan. It’s clear that’s not gonna happen. We’re gonna let the comp plan kind of implement itself. And then build on that. And so I think the pace is gonna be more methodical than a lot of people would want, but ultimately I think it makes sense. 
 

[00:47:14] Doug: Another thing from the interview that seemed to jump out at our readers, at least based on what they were saying online, was when Amy, when you asked about the Office of Mass Engagement that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is rolling out, you asked if she was planning something similar, she just said, not imminently. 

And then, then after the answer she kinda said, yeah, I’m just gonna be constantly compared to, to Mamdani, aren’t I? And you know, she was laughing as she said. So I think it was lighthearted and glib, but people were reading into that a little bit. Or maybe just thought it was funny as well. 

But, I think that is a joke that was probably true that she’s maybe sick of hearing about it or it’s just getting ready to hear about it for four years. But yeah, definitely it’s tough when you’re, you’re held up against someone who’s sort of becoming a little bit of a internet superstar, whatever you wanna call him. 
 

[00:48:00] Amy: Yes. She definitely was joking. And I think you know the reason that I asked that question is because I had heard her give an interview, I think right after she was elected, in which she talked about wanting to have a different strategy for communicating with the public with Seattleites. 

And with her background as an organizer, she’s repeatedly stressed how she wants to bring that kind of philosophy and approach to the mayor’s office. So I was wondering if there was kind of more concrete plans there beyond, beyond what I just said. And when I was preparing for the interview, I was doing a little research to think, you know, what could that look like? 

And it just so happened that Mayor Mamdani had just made this announcement about this new office, which I thought was a good example. And it’s about engaging more with communities. It’s about keeping in touch with the grassroots campaign that, that basically succeeded at getting him elected in the first place and keeping that alive and going for, you know, future campaigns, for future things that he wants to do that are big in the city, which I think is smart and strategic. 

And then he’s doing stuff like, he’s having a rental ripoff, which there are hearings that they’re gonna have across the city of New York where New Yorkers can share their rental horror stories. And then Mamdani has promised that, you know, they’ll consider those stories and try to make policy to address some of those stories. 

So I just thought these are creative ways to engage with the public and I wanted to know what her thinking was there. But I think the answer is we’re gonna have to wait and see. 
 

[00:49:40] Ryan: Well, it sounds like we’re waiting and seeing on a lot of things. We’re gonna be keeping busy over the next couple of months with the Wilson administration getting going and the legislative session pressing on. Before we go, we’re kind of in the middle of a little false spring outside in Seattle right now. 

It’s pretty nice. The sun is shining. I’m curious for what you guys, where do you head when you have the first sign of false spring? What is your first trip? 
 

[00:50:05] Amy: I really love Lincoln Park. Of course, you know, I live in West Seattle, so it’s very convenient for me, but I like to go down to the edge, by the water. Lincoln Park’s kind of on a hill. So there’s the forested part up above. And then there’s this nice walk by the water and I just love to go and walk all the way down the water and then all the way back, I find it very soothing. 
 

[00:50:28] Ryan: Yeah, I wish they could get that heated salt water pool open during the wintertime. 
 

[00:50:33] Amy: Yeah, that would be great. There is a water slide, which I always get excited about, even though I don’t swim there. 
 

[00:50:41] Ryan: It’s pretty fun. What about you, Doug? 
 

[00:50:44] Doug: Yeah, I always love the [Washington] Arboretum. Tough to go wrong with the arboretum, and there’s such a wide collection of trees and plants there that there’s always something that’s, you know, beautiful or flowering there. So, I try to get there in, in multiple seasons, since it’s a relatively easy place to bike to as well, since it’s on the Washington Loop. 

And not too far from me. So that’s the big one. I also love exploring Discovery Park, so I like Amy. I like the mega parks, in particular. But, yeah, I just try to get out in any way I can in the spring. What, what’s your favorite go-to one, Ryan. 
 

[00:51:19] Ryan: Well, you kind of took mine too. I’ve definitely become a arboretum regular with the G Line heading right there, which is pretty great. But I guess I’m gonna go with the waterfront. Always happy to get down there, but when it’s a nice day, pretty, pretty excited to be able to have that on our front porch for downtown. 
 

[00:51:38] Doug: and it keeps getting better too. 
 

[00:51:41] Amy: We’re just so lucky in general here in Seattle, we have so many parks that I feel like whenever I get… I wouldn’t say I get bored of them, but if I am like, oh, I need a little change, I have like a huge list of options. And there’s the big ones, and then there’s so many little ones that I, I feel like I could spend the rest of my life visiting all of them. 
 

[00:52:02] Doug: Yeah, I, I feel very lucky too. There’s always Green Lake, Carkeek, Golden Gardens. I try to keep it moving and on the waterfront, we are about to get a big refresh on the port side of the waterfront, in Centennial Park. So I just bike through there and it’s a pile of dirt right now. But you can tell that they’re getting closer to planting things and it being ready to show it out for the World Cup people. And then Seattleites for ensuing months. 
 

[00:52:27] Ryan: Yeah, you’re right. I, I actually have been kind of avoiding that area subconsciously. I think I’m gonna be going down there a lot more once it finally gets, gets open. 

Well, thanks so much for joining us here on The Urbanist podcast. Happy to come into your ear holes every two weeks. Hope you have a great day. And remember to get outside. 

The post Urbanist Podcast: Olympia Preview and a Highway Boondoggle first appeared on The Urbanist.

Last week, the Bellevue City Council unanimously approved expanding the scope for potential changes to parking requirements the city will adopt by the end of this year, in compliance with Senate Bill 5184.

Approved last spring, the new law bars all cities with more than 30,000 residents from requiring more than one parking stall for every two units in an apartment building, nor more than two stalls for every 1,000 square feet of commercial space. It also exempts certain projects from any parking requirements at all, including affordable housing, senior housing, smaller apartment units, and commercial spaces in mixed-use buildings.

Coming into compliance in 2026 will ensure Bellevue meets a January 2027 deadline for cities over 50,000 in population; smaller cities have an additional 18 months. Bellevue will consider dropping all parking mandates citywide, a path that has been chosen in places like Spokane, Shoreline, and Bremerton but that SB 5184 does not require. Short of that bold step, the City will also consider removing minimums near transit routes, and explore treating building rehabilitation or adaptive reuse — typically required to fully comply with parking requirements that could render their project infeasible — differently than it does new developments.

Adopting lower minimums, or even eliminating them altogether, won’t mean builders can’t build more parking stalls than required. But it does mean that developers can tailor the amount of parking to match expected demand. Some development projects that might be on the verge of viability could move forward without an arbitrary number of stalls.

By 2029, Bellevue will have to drop mandated off-street parking within a half-mile distance of light rail stations, and within a quarter mile of King County Metro RapidRide stops, thanks to another 2025 law supporting transit-oriented development. But adopting three years early could be a major win for housing reforms in Bellevue, especially given the zoning changes that have already been adopted near the city’s light rail stations, which are set to be connected to Seattle in a matter of months.

During an initial discussion of this topic last week, it became clear that changes to the Bellevue City Council’s composition over the past year will likely have a major impact on the ultimate outcome. Since 2023, five of the council’s seven seats have turned over, with progressive candidates faring particularly well this past November. Vishal Bhargava and Naren Briar, two of the council’s newest members, seemed the most open to studying the broadest range of options, including full removal of parking mandates citywide.

“Are minimum parking requirements a good thing or not? And I’m not entirely convinced they’re a good thing, and that it sort of impacts the direction, at least my point of view, on the scope for the study. I mean, they do raise costs for development, housing costs. I know there is also a question of not matching real demand,” Bhargava said. “If we’re stuck to those sorts of approaches that are not flexible over time, that creates those hard and fast requirements that don’t seem to work. The other thing that I think that we have to think about is the impact they have on actual development potential.”

Briar, who took office at the beginning of this year after defeating longtime incumbent Conrad Lee, expressed concern about Bellevue receiving a top-down mandate from Olympia but quickly pivoted to using data to guide the city’s position on how far to go. A 2020 study looking at the effect of parking reforms in Seattle showed that dropping minimums near transit led to 18,000 fewer parking spaces, saving more than a half billion dollars in construction costs.

“Personally, I’m not a fan of the state mandates and how prescriptive they can be at times. Nevertheless, I do think we need to expand our scope, especially if we’re seeing continued investments into our transit infrastructure, and if we’re hurting our local businesses. I’ve spoken to so many entrepreneurs who can’t just seem to settle in Bellevue because the minimum parking mandates are not feasible,” Briar said. “It is important that we understand through the engagement and evaluation process what other cities are doing and how these impacts are prevailing.”

Meanwhile Councilmember Lynne Robinson, fresh off a six-year run as Bellevue’s Mayor and now one of the council’s most moderate members, pushed back on the entire concept behind SB 5184. Robinson conflated the idea of removing mandated parking with builders not building any parking, and even suggested that the City should look at trying to get changes made at the legislature. SB 5184 was approved by more than a two-to-one vote across the two legislative chambers, with strong support from Governor Bob Ferguson’s office.

“There are some things the state is assuming that I just don’t agree with. I don’t agree that four-bedroom low-income housing necessarily does not require parking, and that troubles me, because we’ve seen some of our affordable housing families really struggle,” Robinson said. “I also don’t agree that senior housing doesn’t require parking. We’re not talking about the seniors. We’re talking about all the people who come and serve them, who are dependent on cars for their businesses. So that’s troublesome to me, and I almost wonder if we shouldn’t push back a little bit. I know it’s already a done deal, but maybe there could be a revision made if our intergovernmental staff were to think that was a good idea.”

Mo Malakoutian, Bellevue’s new Mayor, referenced a point raised by Bellevue City staff, that the majority of the city’s parking requirements have been sitting on the books unchanged for decades, with regulations in place in a 1962 zoning book — the oldest one found at City Hall — “mostly matching” the ones in effect today.

“It’s really not a compliance [issue], although it is a compliance [issue], but also it’s updating a code that is maybe for a city, that maybe we don’t have that city anymore. We have a much better city,” Malakoutian said.

Much process lies ahead, with Bellevue’s planning commission set to tackle the issue after City staff conduct public outreach with Bellevue residents. That body has watered down bold proposals developed by Bellevue city staff before, significantly scaling back middle housing regulations last year that ultimately mean fewer homes can be built near transit in a city intending to add over 150,000 homes over the next two decades.

But as a starting point, Bellevue is starting much closer to the end zone on parking reform than many Eastside urbanists might have expected, a fact that bodes well for the conversation that will unfold over the next year.

The post Bellevue Could Take State Parking Reform to the Next Level first appeared on The Urbanist.

Just three short years ago, the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) looked inevitable. After decades of false starts, Washington and Oregon were finally on track to start construction on a new, wider I-5 between Vancouver and Portland, expanding the highway and adding a slew of interchanges while replacing the twin drawbridges that span the Columbia River. The Washington legislature had just set aside $1 billion from a new transportation package specifically for the IBR, and the Oregon legislature would soon match that amount.

The project was headed toward federal approval, and the advocacy groups that had been pushing for state leaders to consider a “right sized” alternative were making little headway.

But now the IBR could be unraveling.

In the immediate wake of the departure of Greg Johnson, the IBR’s longtime program administrator, new reporting by the Oregon Journalism Project has revealed that the megaproject will be much more expensive than either state can likely afford, with a $5 to $7.5 billion cost estimate in 2022 now climbing to anywhere between $12.2 and $17.7 billion. Despite the significant pressures facing the transportation budgets in both Washington and Oregon, these new cost estimates were kept from the lawmakers tasked with overseeing the project. The IBR’s project team spent years signalling that costs would likely go up significantly without revealing the extent of the damage.

Including planned tolls on I-5 — expected to generate up to $1.6 billion — both states have only been able to assemble just under $6 billion for the project to date, with another $1.1 billion in federal transit funding eyed for the bridge’s light rail component, a three-station extension from Expo Center and Downtown Vancouver. That means the funding gap has likely expanded to $5 billion at a bare minimum, a figure that assumes the Trump Administration plans to hand over funding for one of the most contentious elements of the project: a transit line that a former Congressional candidate turned Trump staffer has called an “antifa superhighway.”

Even worse, the funding gap could end up astronomically higher, pending the resolution of a major outstanding design question. For years, the IBR team has been working with the U.S. Coast Guard in the hopes of receiving a permit to move forward with a fixed-span bridge, which would permanently restrict certain types of maritime traffic from navigating upriver. In November, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson touted “a clear path forward” on a fixed-span bridge after agreements were signed with four river users who would be impacted by a fixed-span bridge, but a final decision has not yet been made.

In the event the coast guard requires a movable-span bridge that lifts for maritime traffic, the funding gap would grow to a staggering $13 billion and add another two years to the project timeline, with work not wrapping up until 2035.

On top of all that, the $2.1 billion in federal funding already committed to the project during the Biden Administration could be in jeopardy if construction on the IBR doesn’t start by the end of 2026, an outcome that looks increasingly unlikely.

While Oregon’s transportation budget is in a much more dire situation than Washington’s, neither state is in a position to cover significant cost overruns on the project. Last week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek officially endorsed a full repeal of a stopgap transportation funding package that was passed during an emergency session last year, after a referendum on the package qualified for this November’s ballot. Without that funding, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) could be placed in an “emergency setting,” in the words of one state lawmaker.

In Washington, legislators have spent the past few years dealing with cost increases on other highway megaprojects, including Spokane’s new north-south freeway and a pair of twin highway extensions between Seattle and Tacoma. Those overruns were dealt with last spring via a 6-cent gas tax increase and a slew of other transportation related taxes and fees, but more could be on the way, even as a Ferguson proposal asks lawmakers to leverage those new revenue sources into additional state bonds to stretch transportation dollars even further.

Without this new cost estimate, only being aired now thanks to a public records request filed by Joe Cortright, a Portland economist and Director of the thinktank City Observatory, legislators would likely have been kept in the dark for another entire legislative session, planning budgets with wholly outdated information. Construction on the IBR was originally set to start by late last year, but the project is still waiting for federal approval under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to move forward.

“Frankly, it is shocking to realize that they lied, on the record, not only to me, but to the committee and, by extension, the public at large,” Oregon Representative Thuy Tran, a member of the bi-state committee overseeing the IBR, told the Oregon Journalism Project.

The IBR team, now led on an interim basis by former WSDOT southwest regional administrator Carly Francis, has defended keeping its internal numbers close to the vest, citing the fact that the cost estimates released — while clearly detailed and rigorous — are not final.

“The document you received is a draft basis of estimate, not a completed cost estimate validation process (CEVP). CEVP is a time-intensive process that involves several iterations,” Francis told the Oregon Journalism Project. “The cost estimate is not complete, and this work is ongoing. The program is working through validation of risks and associated costs. We do not yet have a new cost estimate.”

The collapse of the IBR now would mirror events from 13 years ago, when the project’s previous iteration, the Columbia River Crossing, had its project office closed down. Then just as much as now, the politics surrounding a compromise-focused design that included a light rail component on top of additional highway capacity have been fraught, with many Clark County residents unhappy that the proposed bridge wouldn’t do enough to address traffic congestion at the same time that many Portlanders see the project as bloated and an environmental disaster.

While there are some differences between the two projects, the IBR and the CRC remain very similar at their cores, which likely says a lot about how Washington and Oregon have ended up back in this spot.

“I would hope we can declare this dead,” Cortright told Bike Portland in the wake of the release of the new estimates. “This is a failure. It’s not working, and it’s because they’ve had this bloated process that’s tried to deliver this massive, super-sized everything bagel basically for highway engineers and a little bit for transit. And if we were just talking about a bridge replacement, a like-for-like replacement of the interstate bridge, be very different. I also think they’ve given the immersed tube tunnel very short shrift. I mean, the complexity of this bridge, they have to dig 250-foot deep shafts in the river in order to isolate it from seismic issues.”

Could Washington and Oregon return to the drawing board to focus on just a bridge replacement? In an interview with The Urbanist, Rep. Jake Fey, chair of the Washington House transportation committee and another member of the bi-state oversight committee, downplayed the idea of the IBR hiding anything from lawmakers while suggesting that a narrower scope might be the only path forward.

“We’ll see what the number is,” Fey said. “I believe there’s enough money to construct the bridge, tear down the old one and link it where the bridge lands. The project is bigger than that — it has interchanges north and south of the bridge. You might not be able to do all that right now, and a lot of this depends upon the very critical decision on whether the bridge is a lift bridge or not. Is that battle won? I’ve been told it could blow a hole of about a billion dollars.”

But significantly adjusting the project’s scope could require major re-evaluation of the IBR’s environmental documentation, which has all of the individual elements of the IBR tied together to achieve the project’s specific purpose and need. All along, the project team has been relying on recycling the approvals that the CRC received over a decade ago, a fact that led them to set aside the idea of updating that purpose and need to address climate change or equity during the IBR’s development.

But despite high-capacity transit — light rail — being a core project component tied into the NEPA process, Fey brought up the idea of phasing in a rail component at a later date.

“It may be that you have to make it light rail ready, as opposed to actually building it. But I think that’s largely going to evolve out of the process and the determination that [the Federal Transit Administration] does,” Fey said.

But throwing light rail overboard — a move that would be seen by skeptics as a full mask-off moment for the IBR — is likely not even enough to get the project down to an affordable level. While there may ultimately be some path forward, the chances that it looks like the IBR as it stands today appear to be exceedingly unlikely.

The post The Pacific Northwest’s Biggest Highway Project Could be Cooked first appeared on The Urbanist.

Over past two decades, removal of the highway has led to substantially positive environment and public health outcomes, increased business activity along the corridor, redevelopment, and improving traffic flow. Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes showcases what Cheonggyecheon is like today, including newer improvements in recent years, and discusses the pros and cons of Seoul’s approach.

The post Sunday Video: Seoul Removed Highway, Restored River, and Traffic Got Better first appeared on The Urbanist.

Washington has been neglecting basic transportation maintenance work for decades, a fact that is starting to become more and more apparent: nearly 350 bridges in the state highway network are more than 80 years old and overdue for replacement. But rather than rely on a new source of revenue to pay for that necessary upkeep, Ferguson’s budget taps into funding sources that the legislature already approved earlier this year, including a 6-cent increase in the state’s gas tax, and leverages them for the new bonds.

Those new gas tax revenues had allowed legislators to fill a sizable budget gap, brought on by rising infrastructure costs and declining gas tax revenue, and keep a handful of high-profile highway expansion projects moving forward. Those include the extensions of State Route 167 and 509 between the Port of Tacoma and the Port of Seattle, known as the Puget Sound Gateway, the North Spokane Corridor, expansions of I-405 and I-90, and the sprawling Interstate Bridge Replacement.

Ferguson’s budget keeps those projects on track and instead sets the state up for additional debt service payments in future years, at a time when gas tax revenues are predicted to continue to decline. Just before he announced his transportation plan, the governor announced his housing plan, which similarly leaned on bonding to raise $225 million backed by the state’s Housing Trust Fund.

The idea of taking the transportation budget further into debt is likely to face considerable skepticism at the legislature, where 60% of lawmakers in both the House and Senate will need to sign off on any bill authorizing additional bonds. Three years ago, Governor Jay Inslee proposed that the state issue $4 billion in bonds to accelerate the production of affordable housing, an idea that met tepid reception at the legislature and ultimately failed to advance.

Debt service payments already eat up nearly 12% of the state transportation budget, thanks to past transportation packages approved by the legislature that relied on bonding. That’s more than the entire Washington State Ferries budget, and more than double the amount currently spent on state support for public transportation.

Ferguson touted an additional $164 million in highway spending tabbed for next year as enabling the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to boost the number of lane miles that get repaved by more than 600 miles, or a two-thirds increase. Thanks to a Complete Streets mandate approved by the legislature approved in 2022, any sizable preservation and maintenance project in the state needs to include potential pedestrian and bicycle upgrades that can be added at the same time, so that additional roads spending will be poised to provide more dividends than it would have in the past, but at a cost to future transportation budget writers.

Bridge and highway maintenance issues have been front-and-center during Ferguson’s first year on the job, starting with the closure of the SR 516 Carbon River Bridge near Mount Rainier this April. The 103-year-old structure’s steel supports had deteriorated to the point where it could no longer safely support traffic, cutting off an entire access point to Mount Rainier and leaving towns that had depended on tourist revenue from those visitors in the lurch. Following that bridge closure, two more state bridges had to close abruptly due to collisions that caused structural damage, impacting communities for months.

December’s atmospheric river put highway maintenance directly in the spotlight, with high-profile road closures caused by flooding likely to keep entire regions of the state cut off for months. Emergency repairs to US Highway 2, a heavily used corridor providing access to areas including tourist-dependent Leavenworth, began this weekend with no estimated date yet available for the road to reopen.

“Preservation and maintenance work isn’t the sexiest thing, I get that. You know, everybody likes a ribbon cutting for a brand new structure. I like that as much as the next person does, but we have neglected this core mission of our government for too long, and we need to reprioritize and focus on the needs that we have,” Ferguson said. “Painting a bridge or sealing a road may not seem very exciting, but it’s like changing the oil in your car or replacing the timing belt. If you skip that basic maintenance, you could have a catastrophic failure and pay more down the line.”

When it comes to the state ferry system, Ferguson is endorsing the current plan to purchase new hybrid-electric vessels as replacements for the aging fleet, but those boats can’t arrive fast enough. The 58-year-old MV Kaleetan, which had been in service on the Anacortes-San Juan Island route, is currently benched due to a “catastrophic engine failure” that occurred earlier this month. As a result, service on the Fauntleroy-Vashon Island-Southworth route has been reduced during the busy holiday season, illustrating the cascading impacts that result when one boat is out-of-commission.

The first hybrid-electric retrofit to be completed, the MV Wenatchee, has seen a bumpy roll out after first being put back into service on the Seattle-Bainbridge Island run earlier this year. Mechanical issues have led to prolonged service outages, including one for nearly a month. Additional retrofits of existing ferries are officially on hold until after the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which was one of Ferguson’s first major transportation decisions. Advancing future retrofit work before one of the new ferries arrives in 2029 will almost certainly mean reducing service elsewhere in the system.

Ferguson’s $1 billion bond would enable the state to increase the number of boats on order to six, with seven more still in need of replacement before 2040. But calm sailing is far from guaranteed, as more and more legislators start to question the cost premium attached to hybrid-electric boats, and the state’s labor community continues to question the choice to select a Florida-based shipyard as the first company tabbed to produce the next generation of state ferries — instead of a local shipyard in Washington state.

As someone who came into office without a background in transportation policy, Ferguson’s focus has remained on the ferry system, and he’s devoted little attention to other issues like the state’s commitment to eliminate fatal crashes by 2030 as part of the Target Zero initiative. Just this past week, five separate Washington State troopers were involved in traffic crashes while on duty, with one of those crashes resulting in the death of 29-year-old Trooper Tara-Marysa Guting on SR 509 in Tacoma.

While the choice to issue bonds to make inroads on the state’s transportation needs is more politically appealing than turning to a tax increase, the ultimate question will be the long-term impact on the ability to make progress on state goals. Rather than presenting a forward-looking vision for the future of transportation in Washington, Ferguson’s proposal is ultimately focused on maintaining the status quo, when it comes to both the highway system and the ferry system.

Marko Liias (D-21st LD, Edmonds), chair of the state Senate’s transportation committee, praised the proposal in a statement. Despite the fact that Democrats hold a considerable majority over Republicans in the upper chamber, Liias has remained focused on securing GOP support for transportation budget proposals, even going so far as to include a proposed e-bike tax in an initial draft of the 2025-2027 budget at the request of the committee’s ranking member, Curtis King (R-14th LD, Yakima).

“I’m excited the governor is proposing the Preserve Washington fund, providing $3 Billion over 10 years dedicated to preservation and maintenance for our entire transportation system. Funding for preservation and maintenance must be a long-term budget commitment, not a one-time decision,” Liias wrote Friday. “I look forward to reviewing the governor’s priorities in detail with our transportation budget team. When we wrote the biennial transportation budget last session, I committed to delivering a bipartisan plan for Washingtonians, and I intend to stay on that same bipartisan path as we write the supplemental budget next year.”

The 2026 legislative session starts on January 12 and lasts 60 days.

The post Ferguson Proposes Borrowing $3 Billion for Highway Maintenance, Ferries first appeared on The Urbanist.