Notes on Commute Mode and Congestion Pricing

Congestion pricing is bubbling to the surface of conversations about transportation across the country with greater and greater frequency. It inspires a lot of heated arguments, especially regarding its fairness and upon whom the impact would fall most heavily. Less often are the distribution of benefits investigated. Congestion pricing is one of the only strategies that can reliably reduce traffic congestion an urban core. All remaining road users therefore benefit from speedier travel – these are likely to include bus commuters, carpoolers, those who need to drive for their work, emergency vehicles, and, yes, high-income drivers who pay the fee. Ideally, the revenues of congestion pricing are used to further improve public transit and active transportation infrastructure, providing additional benefits for theses non-driving groups.

So who are these drivers, bus riders, and other urban travelers? City Observatory has done some excellent work in this regard, using census data to look at the income of commuters by transportation mode as well as by commute time for the Portland area. They found that rush hour car commuters have one of the highest median incomes of any commute mode. Bus commuters, those who walk or bike, and those who do not work at all have lower median incomes and would see most of the benefits of and none of the costs of a congestion pricing regime.

However I’m not aware of anyone who has done a similar analysis for Seattle. Gene Balk at Seattle Times looked at two specific income categories – those who earn less than $35,000 and those who earn $75,000 or more, and indeed, there were more transit riders in the latter category in Seattle than the former. However, there are a lot of working and middle-class people in Seattle that make between 35k and 75k. So, I decided to attempt to recreate City Observatory’s anaylsis for Seattle, using the incredible (free) IPUMS census research microdata tools.

Here’s what I found:

Just like in Portland, our drivers tend to be among the wealthiest commuters, and those who drive during rush hour (I filtered for those who leave home between 7:00am and 9:00am) are wealthier still. Obviously there is a great diversity in income among those who drive, as there is with the other commute modes and any demographic category.

However, when we talk about congestion pricing and equity we should be clear that it is a policy that:

• would disproportionately benefit lower income groups, especially bus riders,
• the costs of which would be borne by relatively higher income groups, ie peak-hour drivers,
• would reward sustainable commute choices such as transit, carpooling, or walking and biking (climate change is a civilization-threatening emergency),
• reduce the need for very expensive and destructive highway construction by using our existing infrastructure more efficiently, and
• reduce traffic delay for bus riders, emergency vehicles, working vehicles, carpools, and those for whom it is worth it to pay the fee.

It’s time for Pike Pine PBLs

Seattle’s approach to building bicycle infrastructure often has the appearance of an earnest toddler desperately throwing spaghetti against the wall. That spaghetti isn’t nothing – SDOT has built well-designed and protected bike lanes with bright paint buffers or bollards, “cross-bikes” at tricky intersections, bike traffic signals, and other thoughtful applications of bicycle best practices. Though often unconnected to other bike infrastructure and seemingly randomly placed, these bits and pieces are now numerous enough in the city that each new installation is in itself unremarkable. A confident rider can now move about the city in a way that is often pleasant and safe, punctuated with rush of adrenaline when the painted lane suddenly disappears and you are plunged into into traffic. Lately, we’re even getting to the point where all those bits of spaghetti are starting to overlap.

One of the biggest gaps between our bike lane spaghetti is the gaping chasm between Capitol Hill and downtown. A handful of bridges span I-5 here and not one has an uphill bike lane. Even where bike lanes they are present on surface streets, as on Pine, they disappear on the approaches to the bridge. At Pine and Boren cyclists squeeze in between lanes of traffic, including buses, trucks, and highway bound motorists, while queueing for the stoplight.

Pine St & Boren Ave during the morning commute. Photo by the author.

The Basic Bike Network, proposed by bicycle advocates and included in the City’s Bicycle Master Plan, would bridge this gap with protected bike lanes (PBLs) connecting two of the best pieces of bike infrastructure in the city, the cycle tracks on 2nd Avenue and Broadway. The first segment of these protected lanes has in fact already been built, between 2nd and 6th Ave. However, as anyone who has used these lanes can attest, they thrust the rider right back into danger after a few peaceful blocks.

Existing protected bike lane at Pine & 5th Ave. Photo by the author.

On July 18th the City Council transportation committee passed a resolution calling for the completion of the Pike/Pine PBLs as far as Broadway. Theses new lanes would connect First Hill and Capitol Hill, two of Seattle’s densest neighborhoods, to downtown with safe, legible, comfortable cycling infrastructure. The lanes will create a safe place for cyclists of all ages (including the ever growing share of e-bike riders). They’ll also create a more peaceful street environment for pedestrians on adjacent sidewalks and a less stressful environment for drivers who’d rather not hit anybody. All these things are good for businesses and neighborhood residents too. Together they will mark the beginning of a transformational change in our City’s bicycle network in which a person can travel confidently from where they are to where they want to go by bike in a way that is safe, easy to understand, and fun. These are the ingredients that great cycling cities are made of.

The great news is that the lanes are funded (thanks to the Convention Center expansion public benefits package) and the SDOT has actually committed to building them! Interim lanes are to be implemented by December 2019, and they’ll be upgraded to permanent infrastructure along with the construction of the Pike/Pine Renaissance project after the convention center construction is complete (probably 2021).

We want to see these lanes built, the Council wants to see them built, and there are a lot of folks at SDOT who want to see them built too. They know quality infrastructure that connects people with places they actually want to go is how you make cycling a viable option in the city. Now it’s time for us to do our job and ensure the interim design is safe and logical. People who bike, walk, own businesses, and drive in the Pike/Pine corridor will all benefit from well-designed bike lanes.

In the next few months Central Seattle Greenways, Capitol Hill EcoDistrict, and other community partners will be conducting outreach to businesses and the public and communicating with SDOT. We’ll also be co-hosting a public design charrette with the EcoDistrict  in late October to solicit input and sketch out ideas for how the bikelane design can best serve cyclists, pedestrians, businesses and drivers. We’d especially love to to hear from business owners and managers at the charrette to ensure the design works well for everyone.

If you want to learn more about how you can get involved contact Central Seattle Greenways. It’s time to transform our city!

 

 

Get Thee to Middle Fork

Skirting the eastern edges of the greater Seattle area, the Snoqualmie River flows down from the Cascades through a broad river valley spread with farmland and old railroad towns. It’s the eastern edge of our metropolis, of the lowland coastal climate we enjoy, and of our indefatigable transit system, with buses running six days a week boasting bike racks with three slots apiece. The area is rich in history and it also happens to be adjacent to one of the newest, easiest, and most delightful places to ride a bike in the northwest: Middle Fork Road.

Middle Fork Road runs 12 miles from the exurban outpost of Tanner, just east of North Bend, alongside the Snoqualmie Middle Fork in the Middle Fork Snoqualmie Natural Resources Conservation Area, up to the Taylor River/Otter Falls trailhead.  The road runs through a gorgeous valley flanked by rugged mountains which, best of all, cut off any noise from I-90 to the south. Previously a bumpy, rutted mess, the road was paved for the first time last summer and now runs as smooth as butter.  The road is now about 20 feet wide without lane markings, meaning cyclists can’t help but “take the lane” and cars must be alert to navigate the shared space. It rises a total 400 feet imperceptibly as it takes you through countless mountain, river and forest vistas, and past a handful of trailheads and a campground.

With the paving of the road officials are concerned about a shortage of parking as the wider population becomes aware of this gem. Cyclists should get out there this spring before it’s silly with cars – and because we won’t have to worry about finding parking along the road. Take the 554/208 combo from downtown Seattle with a transfer in Issaquah as I did last October or bring your bike in the car and park at Tanner Landing Park or just about anywhere in North Bend. Starting next month you’ll also be able to ride Metro’s new Trailhead Direct service to Mt. Si or the Mailbox peak trailhead, which is accessed from Middle Fork Road. Ideally, this ride should be enjoyed during the week, when traffic is lightest.

The ride is mild enough that you could easily add a day hike to the itinerary, or just ride back into town for a few beers at the local pub before getting the bus back to the City. You’ll also be right by the Snoqualmie Valley Trail and John Wayne Pioneer Trail/Iron Horse State Park for further cycling glory. For truly adventurous cyclists, Goldmeyr Hot Springs lies another 10.3 miles down a still very bumpy gravel road past Middle Fork trailhead.

All in all this was one of the best rides I have ever done in the northwest and I truly hope you’ll check it out for yourself.

To get to Middle Fork road ride drive or bus to North Bend, WA. Get on your bike and take the gravel Snoqualmie Valley Trail east two miles to the intersection with SE North Bend Way where you’ll take a slight left. This is a major road but you only need to ride on it about a third of a mile where you’ll turn left onto SE 140th St which will take you right to Middle Fork Road in a little over a mile. Once you’re on Middle Fork Road but before you enter the Conservation Area SE Lake Dorothy Road offers a low-stress short-cut for about a mile and a half. Map link here.

 

Green country

Throughout the day at work I often will be struck by brief moments of nostalgia – rich but fleeting images of places I’ve been with feelings attached. The memory is visual, but as much as anything it is a moment in a place – the way the light, the air, the sounds, the scenery natural and human came together to form an encompassing clearly realized tableau. Because such things interest me, these are often imbued with what I know of the history and geography of the place.
When I lived in Itapua in the southeast of Paraguay during my second year of Peace Corps service I would go on long bike rides through the countryside all around the town of Natalio where I lived. It was farmland, formerly rainforest. It has been cleared in the past 50 years and is now in a second phase of its settlement, of consolidation of land holdings and infrastructure. The land is still rough though – the first wave of settlement is still visible most places, in the forested gullies, tiny hamlets, improvised bridges and powerpoles, and mud and dust everywhere. I took a number of these rides, north, east, west and south on my rickety Peace Corps-issue bike and the landscapes, all products of human and natural forces, never failed to fascinate me.

Eastern Itapua is a broad plateau cut by the great Parana River and many small rivers and streams. When you are on top of the plateau you can see for many many miles in any direction to an undulating horizon of receding flat topped hills. The land feels ancient and vast. Of course I couldn’t help thinking of the Guarani Indians and Jesuit missionaries who were there three hundred years ago, fleeing from Portuguese raiders and slave-traders and building strange beautiful churches hundreds of miles from any imperial city.
The dirt road cross the countryside mostly in long straight lines. A few follow the land more closely, sticking to a ridge or negotiating the curve of a stream. These often have a parallel road cut in a straight line a short distance away. Thus the two phases of settlement leave their distinctive marks cut into the land.

There are hamlets of all sizes scattered throughout the countryside. Even a cluster of three or four homesteads will often have a tiny store on one of the homes, serving immediate neighbors and those further spread. There are tiny one-room schools throughout as well, though these are disappearing as agriculture is industrialized and the need for the labor of farmhands is reduced. The population brought by the first wave of settlement and lang clearing is reduced by the next wave of economic consolidation.

I took many pictures on these rides, though not nearly as many as I wish I had now. The camera I had then, a cheap digital Kodak point and shoot was a piece of garbage, and I manipulated the originals crudely to try and convey more of what I thought I was seeing. I drew a few of these landscapes as well, though I have always planned to do more. Paint is really the right medium for these flowing forms I suspect.  The human presence was profound but also immediate and clear. Farms, pastures, simple homes, schools and stores, working animals and machines. The elements of place knit together in a seemingly endless stretch of land far from any disruption in the form of cities, mountains or the sea. These green, open, vibrant lands will haunt me the rest of my life.

 

Precedented Growth

The current spurt of population growth in Seattle is big. We’re on track to grow by 130,000 people this decade, rising to a municipal population of 740,000 by 2020 and it has become journalistic convention to refer to this growth as “unprecedented”… which is odd. Seattle is a city with a short history, but we have an even shorter memory.

Seattle is a western boomtown and frenetic, cyclic growth is in the city’s DNA. At the current rate, this decade of growth will not be the largest increase in a single decade ( even just counting since 1900). That occurred in 1900-1910 when the city added 156,000 new residents, and increase of 194%.

In percentage terms our “unprecented” decade appears even less notable. Our projected increase of 130,000 would be 21% above the population in 2010. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. But still, just since 1900 this is only our fourth highest growth rate. The city grew by 27% between 1940 and 1950 and 33% between 1910 and 1920, after the aforementioned 194% growth rate 1900-1910.

The most remarkable thing about the new growth of our city is that for the first time since 1930 Seattle is growing faster than the Puget Sound region as a whole. Puget Sound is only on track to grow by 14% this decade, about half of the average growth rate since 1900. For the first time in a long time Seattle’s share of the regional population is increasing – by about a percentage point to 19%, down from more than half in 1920.

If you care about sustainability, or if you just like the benefits of urban living this is great news! We have sacrificed vast tracts of beautiful forest and farmland to asphalt and bluegrass to build our suburban living quarters surrounding the city. This seems normal, but it’s a choice. When we travel to foreign countries we often delight in the “quaint”, compact, neighborly places we visit which are so close to working and natural landscapes. We could choose to live in such places ourselves.

Just outside Vienna, Austria

We are in fact making progress in this direction, as these growth statistics show. We are also approaching 30 years with perhaps the most robust growth-management program in the nation, the Washington State GMA, which is responsible for some of this trend.

Building on “vacant” land is easy. The plants and animals don’t know to file a lawsuit or form a neighborhood association. There aren’t conflicts with existing residents because there aren’t any and open land can be divided up into parcels for sale and construction.

Adding people to cities is hard. Existing residents can’t help but notice the change, which is among the most visible elements of the mix of disappointments brought on by the passage of time and mortality. As with most things, compassion and creativity make it bearable while corporate and bureaucratic efficiencies make it less so. If we value the awesome landscapes of our special spot in the world, we should try our best to accommodate our new neighbors close to us. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.
* population statistics are from US census bureau. 2020 estimates are straight-line projections using 2016 census bureau estimates. figures were accessed here and here.

Urban Design and Life Between Buildings

Since its formal foundation sixty years ago the discipline of urban design has chiefly concerned itself with a response to the Modernist approach to city building. Modernism held up the idea of a city composed of buildings that were free-standing, internally-focused, unadorned, efficient solutions to the needs of humans for shelter and privacy. These buildings were big, as made possible by new construction methods. They were constructed and designed as singular objects, meaning that they did not combine with nearby buildings or open space to create a coherent form. The only coherent form was the building itself. The new role played by the building in the city caused a fundamental reordering of the shape of cities. And, in this instance, function followed form.

The new shape of the city altered how people lived and moved about, what kind of places they spent time and how the interacted socially. Throughout human history cities were formed of a dense built mass, cut through with narrow alleys, squares, and a few broader thoroughfares. These openings in the built form provided a space for the public life of the city in addition to circulation and access to buildings. The public realm was shaped by the many buildings which surrounded it and life that flowing through it into and out of these buildings. It was composed of nothing more than the sum of the relationships between these elements (Kostof 1991).

The modernist approach to architecture and city building was an acknowledgment of the 20th century changes in construction and transportation technology and it was an earnest attempt to deal with the many problems of the industrial city, with its crowded, polluted, and unhealthy slums, economic inequality, and congested streets. Still, urban designers found it necessary to repudiate many of the tenets of the modern city and its effects in their own work. This was perhaps most powerfully achieved by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she the compares modernist city planning to the archaic medical practice of bloodletting, saying “years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.” Jacobs calls out for a new discipline of city planning based around the ways cities work in reality, derived from nothing more than the observation of cities themselves (J. Jacobs 1961).

The key element that Jacobs searches for in her study of the real functioning city is life, and the circumstances and environments which sustain it in an urban environment. This life is found in the street, in the “sidewalk ballet”, in well-used parks and in safe, supportive, vibrant neighborhoods. This quality has been sought by many theorists of urban design throughout the development of the field. It is something like “magic”, a “sense of place”, greatness, life, and it happened in the public realm, a result of the complex interplay of the built elements of the city and of lives of the people who inhabited them. This quality was perhaps best characterized by Jan Gehl, who called it the “life between buildings” (J. Jacobs 1961) (A. Jacobs 1993) (Cullen 1961) (Gehl 1987).

Thursday morning I went to the Island

This morning I went out to the island to write. I walked out my door around seven, got on the train downtown, took the passenger ferry and then the bus into town, where I arrived about a quarter after eight. The reverse commute is a strange special thing. You start out in the midst of the morning rush, through downtown amidst the office workers and bums, but before long you’re nearly by yourself, and then you plug right into the island’s sleepy, but industrious daily life. It felt a bit like I’d arrived in another country, with different customs and values and social problems, and a different kind of economy.

The bus from the ferry dock into town is particularly resonant. I grew up on a hill on the north end of the island, a short, steep walk up from the dock. I rode the bus to school, basically the same route for nine or so years. We’d start out nearly empty, power up the big hill, head down around the Dilworth loop where we could see the sunrise against the mountains at certain times of year. The bus passed through town and by the coffee roasterie, where on roasting days the the toasty, smooth smell of which alerted us that we were nearly to school.

The bus ride this morning skipped the Dilworth loop but it wasn’t so different. It is a county bus, but just like the school bus it stops for people on the side of the road, where there is no sidewalk or signpost or any perceivable clue that a bus stop is present. We don’t run the Dilworth loop, but we do pick up a few people along the “highway”, the main two-way road that runs down the spine of the island. Each has their own business about the island, and is dressed in their own uncoordinated attempt to resist the wind and rain. Or not all uncoordinated. Two men get on the bus just up the hill from the dock, they are medium height, with decent bellies, each has a straight handled full-size umbrella. They are both wearing hats, one a paperboy and the other a sort of German-style fedora with a little feather. One wears a leather jacket and the other a denim jacket, with canvas sleeves. They are twins. I remember riding the school bus with them many years ago. I think they were two or three grades below me.

They sit down opposite each other in the front part of the bus. Each has their phone in their right hand and their left on the handle of their umbrella. They get off just past town, on the funny little “Dead End” street that leads the the islands’ quiet industrial park, and open their umbrellas and set off on foot, perhaps walking the half-mile to a place of employment.

I get off at the Roasterie. It is one of the oldest buildings on the island and was built with a spatial logic that has become foreign with the passage of time. It sits right out on the street, with a long front porch, where the excellent coffee is served. Inside, odd tables and stools are arranged around jars of medicinal herbs, houseplants, historic coffee paraphernalia, with newspapers, cards, cribbage and chess sets, and posters about island happenings scattered about. The large windows are only twenty feet from the street and cars stop directly in front of the building for the four-way stop at the intersection of Highway and Cemetery. People in cars look out to see if they know anyone on the porch, roll down their window to yell a quick Hello How Ya Doin’ while the porch folks look out at the car passersby just the same.

The school buses roll by around nine. Their windows are foggy. Temporary drawings and messages have been written all over, traced with fingertips on the cold glass and slowly fading. On the lower panes openings in the fog have been hastily cleared with sleeves and little faces can be seen looking out at the world.

Bike to the train

In Portland Oregon a silver spheroid carries three thousand-odd people per day from the banks of the Willamette river to Oregon Health and Science University’s Marquam Hill hospital five hundred feet above. This aerial tram was constructed to deal with the access problems arising from its challenging physical location. With steep winding roads and limited parking availability the hospital needed to figure out how to allow people to access the campus without driving, or to relocate.

Initial plans for the tram included racks for about 10 bicycles to park at the bottom. At the urging of planners at the Portland Bureau of Transportation this was doubled to space for 20. However, the location proved perfect for bicycle access – its low elevation is on the same plane as most of Portland’s most popular cycling routes and bicycles are able to circumvent the bottlenecks at the end of each bridge which make automobile and bus travel painfully unreliable. The racks were quickly overloaded and most people chose to carry their bikes with them up the tram. Bikes left unattended and far away must be securely locked, with lights and bags removed. Even then wheels and saddles are subject to theft. The crush of cyclists in the the tram reduced its capacity significantly.

Kiel Johnson, a cyclist and a friend of mine interning with the Hospital’s transportation office in 2011 had an idea. If there was a secure location at the bottom of the tram, people could leave them there without worry. It could be attended by paid staff who would watch over the bikes – lights, bags, helmets, wheels and saddles and all – and the bikes wouldn’t even need to be locked up. Cyclists in need of a new tube or a tune-up could place a work order with a mechanic on staff and have it ready in time for their commute home. The whole thing needn’t take up much space – hundreds of bikes can fit in an area that would park only a handful of cars. In fact it could be located in vacant space below the tram, advertising it’s services to everyone enjoying the view from above.

And so the Go By Bike shop and valet was born, founded by Kiel and funded by OHSU. Together with the tram it solves a unique problem in an efficient and delightful way. It is hard to imagine Portland’s south waterfront without either, though the tram is only ten years old and the valet only five. Peak daily usage of the valet in 2012 was 180 bicycles. Last year’s peak highest daily count was 420, with another 150 parked on nearby racks outside of the valet.

Bike Valet in Seattle?

Kiel and I have spoken a number of times about the possibility of a bike valet here in Seattle, our home city. The natural analogue to his in Portland location – a rapid transit station near a major institution – is the new UW light rail station . However, the usage pattern of the UW station presents a problem. Many people could bike to the station from surrounding neighborhoods to use light rail in their commutes, but these are not people that UW, the property owner around the station, is much concerned about. Their students and professors arrive from other locations to the UW station. A bike share system – perhaps a UW-only version of the shortly to be discontinued Pronto system – would probably make more sense.

A bicycle valet needs to be located on the other side of a transit commute, between the travelers’ home and their entry point into the system, the so-called “last mile”. This allows the valet to operate during the day and to close up at night having returned all bikes in its care. In Seattle the light rail station in the area with the highest population density is Capitol Hill. The elevation changes surrounding the hill make it daunting to bike up and down, but cycling around the hill is rather pleasant. A valet at the light rail station here could serve riders who have a long walk to station but would be concerned about leaving their bike in a highly trafficked area with a visible homeless population. With 6,000 riders per day in just its first year, the Capitol Hill station alone already has twice the ridership of Portland’s aerial tram.

A new valet could partner with the Capitol Hill Eco-District for funding and there is currently large amounts of flat, vacant land on top of the station that would be perfect for storing bikes during the day – there is even a fence! That land is slated to be redeveloped but nearby street parking spaces, utility corridors, sidewalks, or even a corner of Cal Anderson park could potentially accommodate the 4,000 square feet occupied by the Portland valet. Kiel started the valet by asking: “how can we make arriving and leaving a place by bicycle the best possible experience”? Perhaps it’s that time Seattle cyclists got such a treatment.

Sources:
https://bikeportland.org/2016/05/20/go-by-bike-valet-has-doubled-its-users-in-three-years-183889 

http://www.gobybikepdx.com/about-us
http://crosscut.com/2009/08/dense-denser-densest/

https://www.seattletransitblog.com/2016/08/11/ulink-ridership-by-station/

And conversations with Kiel

Letter to Ramez Naam – Cofessions of an Urbanist

Hi Ramez

Thanks for the lecture last night in AP’s class. It was definitely the most informative session on climate change I have ever attended. I’d love it if you could send me the slides.

As I was leaving I have to admit I was feeling a bit disoriented. I’m a Master of Urban Planning student. I like compact cities, active transportation, walkable environments, free-market land use, subsidized mass transit. I’m also a white millennial who grew up on Vashon Island and I can’t help loving things that are hand-made and sustainably sourced. I lived in Paraguay in the countryside for two years and I really love certain bits of technology – refrigeration, the internet, stereos and buses are nice – but find a lot of our American lifestyle overburdened with superfluous junk. It means we have to work all the time to afford to buy everything we think we need and it creates distance between us.

I’ve looked at climate sustainability as the underlying justification for my intended career in urban planning as well as my lifestyle habits and choices. In a world of carbon pricing we would need to learn to live more cheaply, closer together, locally, throw away a little less, share a little more. Excess would be less of a birthright, solo driving in cars would not be considered the default mode of transportation and we would not devote so much of our land to freeways, subdivisions and golf courses. All my fantasies for how I would like to see society transform were basically justified in service of reducing carbon emissions.

Your lecture and the defeat of I-732 (I gathered several hundred signatures and canvased for the initiative) really seem to collapse that fantasy. I agree with most everything you said and you obviously have data to back it up. I was excited by the drop in solar prices, but I was dispirited when I realized it meant we’re probably not going to learn how to live better with less and instead just make excess more sustainable and cheap. If electric cars become cheaper and more popular than internal-combustion cars, vehicle miles driven will continue to increase, with freeways, gridlock, low-density suburbs, traffic violence, toxic storm-water runoff, parking minimums as ubiquitous as ever.

It does make sense to me how conservatives would automatically oppose climate action as it has been identified with things that liberals like us like. Especially as it has become identified with the things that urbanists like me really like, such as mass transit and apartments. It has always bothered me that so many liberals seem fine with smug actions to seemingly wash their own hands of climate change without structurally changing anything. I do it too. The more I am comfortable living without a car, the more a carbon tax would actually benefit me at the expense of the person who drives a big truck because it is identified with their way of life. Of course conservatives are going to oppose a tax that is levied on their way of life.

So, I want to thank you for coming in and for your excellent lecture and for the work you did during the I-732 campaign. I remember listening to the Stranger podcast where you debated someone from Sage or Got Green and just nailed it. I was in Denmark at the time and followed the campaign a little bit obsessively. It seemed so good and rational and a way to push society to transform in the ways I’d like. I suppose I also ought to thank you for pouring some cold water on the selfish vision that my ideal world is also the world as it should be to reduce climate change. That’s how it always goes with grand visions. I can still justify low-car living on the grounds of health, safety, economy, and local environmental impacts, at least.

Now, what do we do about Naomi Klein?

best,

Ian Crozier
Master of Urban Planning | Class of 2017
University of Washington

Carbon WA after 732

Last Wednesday night I drank beer with Kyle Murphy, the new Executive Director of CarbonWA. CarbonWA is the environmental organization which wrote and lead the campaign for Initiatve 732 in the 2016 election – which lost by 18 points, 41% to 59%. We discussed that election, the national political moment, the prominent role Washington state has been playing in national politics by resisting the Trump administration, and the future of Carbon WA.

The results of the election were deeply disappointing to supporters of I-732. The initiative was a revenue-neutral carbon tax, designed to financially reward consumers and producers for making low-carbon choices and to mitigate financial impacts by reducing other taxes in equal measure and funding a tax-credit for low-income families. With Washington state having the most regressive tax code in the country this element of I-732 was very important to me. Efficient as a carbon tax is, all else being equal it falls most heavily on the poor.

The initiative was crafted to have bipartisan appeal by making our economy more environmentally sustainable without raising taxes overall. Instead it was attacked from both the left and the right, with prominent environmental, social, and labor organizations endorsing a no vote and winning support from few prominent Republicans or business organizations.

CarbonWA has downsized since the election. Murphy and remaining board-members are looking for the ways the organization can be most helpful in the coming years. It is possible that a carbon-tax initiative could be placed on the ballot in 2018, but relatively low Democratic turnout during mid-term elections could put such an effort at a structural disadvantage. We discussed smaller-scale actions the organization could take, with targeted ballot initiatives, state-level lobbying, or local organizing. The ballot initiatives that passed in 2016: raising the minimum wage, temporary limits on gun access for the mentally disturbed, protections for care-givers to the elderly, toothless opposition to the Citizens United ruling – all deal in a narrow way with a popular issue. 732 on the other hand was broad and sober in its attempt to remake the economy and focused mostly on the negatives – the negative effects of carbon pollution and taxation, while negating also tax revenue. In the future CarbonWA could try to identify a more narrowly defined but popular issue and to craft ballot language that would still make an impact on carbon pollution: a tax or ban on the coal- or oil-trains which frequently pass through our state, for instance, or a “clawback” of federal subsidies for fossil fuels.

Oil train near King County Airport

It is challenging to identify a politically popular climate-change measure that would have a significant impact on the problem, however. Burning fossil fuels for energy is deeply embedded in the way we have built our society – it affects nearly everything about how we go about our daily lives. The problem is with us, and scapegoating unpopular actors or obscure practices is simply going to delay the difficult transition that we will have to start making if we are going attempt to reduce climate disruption in a substantive way.

It is very likely that a carbon-tax will be on the ballot in 2020, either sponsored by CarbonWA or a coalition of environmental groups. That ballot measure should preserve the best parts of 732, the low-income tax credit and statewide sales tax reduction that reduce the regressivity of our tax code. However, it should abandon strict revenue neutrality – this failed to win many Republican votes and was unpopular among Democrats. It could front-load subsidies for energy retrofits and job-training and delay the imposition of the tax by several years. These could be paid for on credit by future positive tax revenues and would give those negatively affected by the change time to make changes to reduce their costs. Ideally such a measure could pass in a state where our legislature will have finally achieved an agreement to adequately fund education, taking the pressure of any potential tax to compensate for an unrelated budget hole.

In the early months of the Trump administration our state is taking on a higher profile role in progressive government than it has traditionally played by standing up for immigrants and refugees.  In fact, this role builds on recent Cascadian leadership in marijuana legalization and marriage equality, and is buttressed by our states’ economic strength in technology and international trade. I am hopeful that our state will rise to the challenge of leading the way in dealing with climate change in a serious and just approach.