Packer: City staff created shovel-ready design for Lake Washington Blvd safety upgrades before Mayor Harrell cancelled them

A construction-ready engineering plot city staff created for a planned safety upgrade to the intersection of Lake Washington Boulevard and S Orcas Street. Published by the Urbanist.

Staff at both Seattle Parks and SDOT worked together to fully design a series of planned street safety upgrades to Lake Washington Boulevard, including additional speed humps to slow speeding and a redesigned intersection at S Orcas Street. The existence of late-stage design documents and internal communications uncovered by Ryan Packer at the Urbanist demonstrate that the city was planning to go ahead with the previously announced safety upgrades to the street as recently as the spring before Mayor Bruce Harrell's office told them to cancel them.

Final design documents represent a lot of work and public investment to create a plot ready to be handed off to a city work crew or contractor. Usually public debate happens during earlier phases of design, such as the concept images Seattle Bike Blog posted in a previous story. The concept phase gives the public enough information to have an informed debate before investing a ton of time and money into the minute details needed to create a final construction plot. For a final design, staff must study the existing conditions to make exact measurements and check for any needed repairs to existing infrastructure like damaged pavement or curbs. They also need to determine the locations and access needs for any other utilities (the new design can't obstruct a gas or sewer cover for example). They have to make sure water drainage will still function correctly and safely, and they have to analyze all the turning angles and line markings to ensure every detail meets the relevant engineering standards. It's a huge amount of work, and something the city only does if they actually intend to build something because it would be a big waste of precious staff time and taxpayer money to go through all this work for nothing. A February Teams chat documented both that staff were intending to move forward with construction and that the mayor's office stopped them:

With the intersection changes fully designed, city staff asked superiors if the city move forward with issuing a work order for it in a late February Teams chat.

Yes, that should work from an outreach standpoint. The only consideration is if the mayors office wants that pulled from the project, but we won't know until march," was the reply from Jordan Hoy, leading the Lake Washington Boulevard project for Seattle Parks. It was also Hoy who raised questions about a proposal to remove an all-way stop near Mount Baker Beach from an earlier set of changes to the corridor, a move that also seemed to go against what the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) had determined was warranted at the intersection.

When Mayor Harrell's office cancelled the project over the summer, they tried to hide their decision by announcing a dramatically reduced project list without acknowledging that anything had been cut. Seattle Bike Blog and others had to use the Wayback Machine to find archives of older versions of the project webpage to determine what the mayor's office had removed. The list included most of the safety upgrades, including the Orcas intersection.

Within a couple weeks of the reduced and changed work on the street, which included some new center line reflectors and new fog lines on the sides of the road, Bradley Hawkins was struck from behind and injured while biking home from a trip to the mountains. The person who hit him did not cross the newly-reflectorized center line or slow down, then fled the scene after the collision. He was struck so hard that multiple pieces of the damaged car were destroyed as well. He had some bad scrapes and back pain, but luckily his injuries were not more serious considering the speed of the impact. He was struck in an area what was scheduled to get speed humps before the mayor cancelled them. His injuries should be a wake-up call to city leaders that this work has real life consequences.

These documents, uncovered through a public information request because the city is still obscuring the truth around the handling of this project, further make the case that Bruce Harrell isn't up for the job of mayor. The public bears the consequences of the mayor's anti-safety decisions like these whether they are injured, killed or simply feel unsafe accessing our streets and parks. Now it is time for the mayor to bear the consequences of his decisions as the public heads to the ballot box. Vote for Katie Wilson!

Ballots will be mailed tomorrow and are due back by 8 p.m. November 4. The deadline to register or update your registration online is November 27. After that, you can still register and vote in-person at a vote center up to and including election day.