Lake Washington Traffic Interference

Ryan Packer for The Urbanist on 2025-10-07:

South Seattle traffic safety advocates have been trying to piece together what happened behind the scenes to cause Seattle Parks and Recreation to quietly cancel a set of planned safety upgrades along Lake Washington Boulevard this year. The traffic calming measures, which had been announced in 2024, were the result of a long community process around the future of the park boulevard, but they were abruptly removed from the project’s website in July.

I'll add on a little more context. During Covid (July-October 2020), as part of the Stay Healthy Streets/Keep Moving Streets program, a good chunk of Lake Washington Boulevard was closed to non-local car traffic, encouraging walking and biking along the stretch of street, as were many other non-arterial streets throughout Seattle. The long community process referred to above began out of public sentiment formed during that program's run:

Ethan Bancroft for SDOT Blog on 2022-05-09:

As you may be aware, in response to the pandemic, during summer 2020, we closed 3 miles of Lake Washington Blvd to cars and opened it for people to walk, bike, roll, scoot, and roller skate. Building on the program’s success and an outreach campaign in early 2021, last summer we again closed 3 miles of Lake Washington Blvd to cars on the weekends and holidays, from July 2021 to October 2021.

Now, thanks to Councilmember Tammy J. Morales, we have $200,000 in the City of Seattle’s 2022 budget to work with the community and explore the right balance of closures and possible permanent operational changes to promote more walking, rolling, and biking on Lake Washington Blvd in the future.

That long community process continued for a couple more years, with a set of traffic calming measures being announced in 2024, and then quietly shelved and only implemented piecemeal. Speculation at the time was that Mayor Bruce Harrell, who was not mayor when the street closure program started and only just elected when the community outreach for possible permanent changes began, interfered with the process because he lives in the neighborhood. The Urbanist has received access to records around the process and pretty much confirmed that Harrell interfered with the planned traffic calming mechanisms by taking action to approve or deny specific pieces:

The conversations confirm prior reporting by The Urbanist and KUOW showing the direct involvement that the Mayor’s Office had in the Lake Washington Boulevard project. They show that Seattle Parks and Recreation and Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) staff working on the project were put in the position of negotiating over individual elements of the corridor redesign for months after a public meeting in December that the city has pointed to as a basis for its decision-making.

This appears like unethical interference to me. The Mayor's Office has no reasonable rationale to explain why it's adjusting the process, leaving an unethical conflict of interest as the only explanation. It is unethical usage of the office like this, among other ugliness, that will see me voting for Katie Wilson for mayor this coming November.