Seattle Releases Draft 20-Year Transportation Plan

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) published a draft of the new Seattle Transportation Plan (STP), culminating a year and a half of planning and public engagement.

A blog post by Katie Olsen, written for SDOT, announces the draft and asks for public input. SDOT has created a Seattle Transportation Plan Online Engagement Hub to help facilitate the learning and engagement process. 

Ryan Packer also writes an article for The Urbanist providing insight into the STP in context of other recent plans, as well as transportation planning efforts reaching into the more distant past. According to Packer, today’s residents echo some of their forebears, as expressed in the words of a report by the 2000 Seattle Commission, published in 1973:

“Individual motor vehicles, in their consumption of land and energy resources, imposition of visual blight and physically dividing barriers, creation of vehicular congestion, noise, air pollution and more tangible hazards to life and safety, are the most disruptive present means of transportation in the city,” that final report stated.

So, for example, “Making space for pedestrians on the city’s streets was the number one most responded-to option when participants were asked which specific actions they’d support, while readying the city’s streets for ‘emerging technologies,’ like autonomous vehicles, ranked last,” writes Packer.

According to Packer’s assessment of the plan, all the good intentions and grand ambitions contained in the draft will only go so far as the implementation of the plan allows. “For example, the ambitious 2015 Move Seattle Levy set up a transformative plan that matches the ambitions of Seattleites only to be undercut with delays and a stubborn political reality that could set things back even further,” writes packer.

More details about what’s in the draft STP are included at the source article below.