Candidates for Seattle’s 2025 Citywide Council positions 8 and 9 outline their transportation priorities
All candidates answered YES during the lightning round when asked, Do you support building more protected bike lanes to complete a safe bike network?"Both citywide City Council seats are up for grabs this year, and the recent housing and transportation candidate forum combined candidates for both races into a single panel. Hosted by a large coalition of transportation and urbanism organizations, including Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Cascade Bicycle Club and Bike Works, the forum is one of the best opportunities to hear the candidates speak directly to biking and safe streets issues before the August 5 primary (register to vote or update your registration address online).
Unlike the District 2 Council candidate forum, which only had four people on stage, the citywide forum did not have the time to ask multiple questions about specific street safety issues. During the lightning round, none of the candidates said they use a bike as their primary form a transportation, but they all signaled that they support building more protected bike lanes to complete a safe bike network." So that's something.
For Position 8, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Ray A. Rogers and Rachael Savage attended the forum. Candidates Cooper Hall and Jesse A. Jones did not attend. Hall, Rinck and Savage are using Seattle's democracy voucher program. All the active Position 9 candidates attended: Dionne Foster, Mia Jacobson, Connor Nash and Sara Nelson. Previous candidate Marc J. Sachnoff withdrew from the race. Foster is the only candidate using Seattle's democracy voucher program, and Nelson is the only candidate with an independent expenditure committee spending money on her behalf.
What are your top transportation priorities?Dionne Foster (P9): For me, transportation is about making sure that we make it reliable, affordable, and accessible, as well as safe. I think about making sure that we have safe connections to transportation. That means making investments in sidewalks and street calming so that people can get from their home, their place of work, their child care to the bus station. It means that we need to continue with affordability. Our investments that are making sure that, you know, the youth ORCA passes are in place. Our investments that are making sure that we have the transit passes for folks who are at Seattle Housing Authority. Those are huge priorities. And then making sure that people feel safe waiting for the bus, riding the bus, and that our transit operators feel safe. And then we want to continue to invest in reliability. Seattle has bought down a lot of service from King County Metro with the Seattle transportation measure, and we want to continue to do that so we can work on our efficiency and our reliability."
Mia Jacobson (P9): My biggest issue for transportation would be to create a policy-making process that relies on the contribution of everyone who uses the transportation system. I'm running for council to kind of bring attention to the fact that our society has dramatically changed in the last 20 years. The rate of technology has fundamentally changed the way we use information, the way we talk to people. We can coordinate online in huge groups. We can use data scrapes with data analytics to figure out exactly what the people think and what our issues are, and we can have a more participatory process. As it stands, our local policy-making process is completely unaccessible by the citizenry. So that means that if you have an issue, if you have a solution, and you're not on council or on the committee or invited specifically to speak on that issue, your information is never part of it. And I think that we've evolved out of that process."
Connor Nash (P9): I would say my number one concern is safety, especially on our roads. As someone who walks nearly everywhere and sometimes scoots, but mostly walks, I just feel unsafe being on the sidewalk and so I want to have more protected bike lanes. I want to have safer sidewalks. I want more street trees. I kind of want to make cars a little bit uncomfortable to go fast. Because when they feel uncomfortable to go fast, that means our pedestrians and our bikes are safer. And I would say my second priority would be to make transit far more accessible. And that does mean making it free. And I really do want our buses, our light rails, to be free for everybody to use. I don't think that you should have to pay to have to do it because you already pay for it in your taxes as we heard from our past panel that it is paid through from sales tax and all of our taxes. It should be free for all of us to use."
Sara Nelson (P9): My top priority is transit safety first and foremost. I am proud to be endorsed by [Amalgamated Transit Union"] ATU 587, and I believe it's partly because I put safety first and foremost because this is an area that Seattle city government, local government, can actually control. We can have all the buses and all the light rails we can invest in and afford, and even that we can't afford. But my point is that if people do not feel safe getting on a train or a bus, going to work, going to see a friend, going to school, circulating throughout the city, it does us no good to have that transit. And so my responsibility as a City Council member is to improve public safety and that starts with transit. There were 14,000 safety and security incidents in 2023 to Q1 2025 on light rail and 5,400 on Metro..." [moderator calls time]
Alexis Mercedes Rinck (P8): Happy Pride, everybody. So as someone who is car-free by choice, I recognize how deeply important having an expansive transit system is. And I'm car free by choice. That wasn't always a choice. And I know I represent 20% of Seattle households that also live car-free. So making sure that we are maintaining and keeping a safe transit system is incredibly important, but also looking at investments that prioritize walking, rolling, and taking transit as we are moving forward, particularly when we're looking at areas that have been deprived of such investments such as much of South Seattle. And paired with that, I want to make sure that we're keeping projects online, key capital projects online that are currently under threat because of federal budget cuts. So, making sure we're making progress on rapid ride J is tremendously important to me. Making these investments means that we can encourage more folks to get out of cars and get onto transit. And lastly, making sure we have safety on transit for drivers and passengers and making progress on Vision Zero."
Ray A. Rogers (P8): Safety. As Sara said, there are many contributing things that we could add to public transportation, but nothing supersedes safety. Talking to a person as a young teen who traveled Metro from out gang-ridden parts of the neighborhood as we see struggling to the day with the youth now. And if I could see, it's more connectivity, transportation, connecting, allowing opportunities for youth to come from out of some of these areas where it's hard hit with gang violence and many other things, drug addiction, the selling of narcotics. And so transportation, although it's critical, we need to make sure that we're providing such so that youth can come from one part of the city to the next. We're noticing that it's taking too long for them to be able to get from one part of the city to the next."
Rachel Savage (8): So for me, it's safety that is the most important thing for both of our buses and our light rails. And I want to see our light rail and buses safe, I want to see them clean, and I want to see them welcoming. I love what Sound Transit put together, the plan to man, or rather, to put fare gates on our light rail platforms, and I want to take it a step further and propose we man those fare gates. We can increase public safety if we do that. If we have people at the fare gates, they can see right away if someone's having a mental health issue, they can call the care team. If someone's intoxicated, they can call SPD. If someone is experiencing a health crisis, they can call the fire department. And that will increase our safety day one if we implement that plan. And I think it's practical, I think it's fair, and I think it's compassionate."