Seattle Planning Commission Urges Reimagining of the City’s Streets

A doc submitted to the town of Seattle by its Planning Fee outlines an formidable set of suggestions geared toward reclaiming public right-of-way for individuals, mitigating the affect of local weather change, and enhancing security on the town’s streets. The transient notes that highway deaths and accidents are on the rise regardless of the town’s Imaginative and prescient Zero pledge.

“The transient goes on to notice that the town won’t be able to accommodate the expansion anticipated within the coming a long time if streets proceed for use in the identical method they’re now, stating that the established order will ‘actually kill us,’” Ryan Packer writes in The Urbanist. The Fee calls on the town to incorporate their suggestions within the replace of the Seattle Complete Plan, which is able to endure a serious replace in 2024. 

“Among the many Planning Fee’s suggestions is the elimination of car storage from the present Complete Plans’s record of wants that needs to be accommodated on metropolis streets,” calling as an alternative for “a citywide parking coverage and plan that appears to steadiness income wants with alternatives for multi-function streets that present extra choices, public house, and environmental advantages.”

The fee additionally highlighted the discrepancy between the proposed complete plan replace and the Seattle Division of Transportation’s Transportation Plan, which, based on a letter despatched to SDOT earlier this yr, “seem[s] to imagine a future excessive fee of trip-making by privately owned autos, with the one variable being whether or not these autos are electrical.” The deal with electrification, the fee identified, “will miss a possibility to judge options that the Metropolis has much more affect over, and that align with the forthcoming replace to the Complete Plan.”

As Packer notes, it stays to be seen whether or not the mayor and metropolis council will undertake the Planning Fee’s daring, transformative imaginative and prescient for extra sustainable and equitable land use and transportation planning.