Seattle's traffic solutions are built on flawed principles

This post originally appeared in the Puget Sound Business Journal on April 27, 2018.

I wonder if anyone is as perplexed as I am by the volume of plans, commissions, studies, consultants, and campaigns to solve the region’s mobility challenges. These problems have been the subject of Seattle ballot measures, proposals, and new master plans promising to address and improve our conditions.

As Seattle continues to experience rapid growth, the roadways and systems that were already inadequate are not improving to meet our present and future needs. 

Business cannot thrive if our employees, goods, services, customers and ourselvesare stuck in a perpetual traffic jam. While I credit the policy-makers who have worked so diligently to improve traffic, their plans are based on what I might call some flawed assumptions. 

Perfect is the enemy of the good — laboring over a plan that will solve everything distracts local policy-makers from taking advantage of easy, quick fixes for discrete subsets of Seattle’s transportation problems.

One example is the “war on cars.” Certain policy-makers believe that we can drastically improve traffic congestion by getting drivers out of cars and onto bicycles. On some arterials, we are dedicating 30 percent of the lanes to 3 percent of Seattle’s commuter population. Most importantly, the dozens of new bike lanes and bike-share programs have failed to make a dent in Seattle’s traffic congestion. 

While I might admire the principle, Seattle is cold and rainy most of the year. To commute up and down Seattle’s steep hills, cyclists require nerves and quadriceps of steel. Given these conditions, it is unreasonable to expect Seattle parents to transport their children to and from school or day care by bicycle. Not very practical.

The only prediction that is empirically sound is that the number of people, goods and services that require transportation through Seattle will continue to grow exponentially. The driverless car solution won’t solve the problem drivers and businesses are facing right now.

I propose that Seattle should crowdsource solutions to its traffic problems. Seattle should create, maintain and engage with an online forum that solicits public feedback for immediate and near-term fixes. What I am describing is not a customer service line or a “contact us” form that delivers complaints into a bureaucratic void.

Rather, Seattle should do as the tech sector does: Listen to users and engage them for ideas on how to improve discrete aspects of the product. Ask them questions, initiate quick fixes (e.g., improved signal timing, additional leading pedestrian intervals, and getting bikes off sidewalks), and improve the product in phases with short-term projects.

There is no way a handful of well-intentioned engineers and policy-makers can identify every problem or conceive of every solution without drawing on the experience of residents and businesses. 

If Seattle has something like this already, it needs to be reinvigorated. I submit this should be on the home page of the Seattle Department of Transportation. I also recommend the city look to the Seattle business community for how to build and use this tool.

Rather than continue to search for the perfect all-encompassing transportation solution, Seattle needs to attack its transportation problem one bite at a time. 

Policy-makers should focus their efforts on achievable near-term goals guided by feedback from the community. Obviously, the plans, commissions, consultants and campaigns cannot have all the answers, and the city is losing the trust of its commuters. That is a constituency that is too large to ignore, and it is growing, not shrinking.