• March 21, 2016

Janette Sadik-Khan and Mayor Ed Murray get in a #StreetFight. May the best urbanist win!

Town Hall Seattle 1119 8th Avenue Monday, March 21. 7:30-9 PM. Doors open 6:30PM

1. What percentage of a city's transportation budget should go towards making streets safe for people who walk? Towards Vision Zero generally?
2. Should safety improvements go in first in low-income neighborhoods? How do you counter the charge of gentrification when you make streets safer?
3. What's the best approach to talking to small business owners when you put protected bike lanes next to their shops? Do you remove or add parking to protect bike lanes? (we love the idea of parked cars protecting most bike lanes as you did in NYC -- we haven’t seen car protected bike lanes in Seattle much yet)
4. How can we sell a Center City downtown network of protected bike lanes to our business and political leaders as the smartest choice economically and politically? Seattle has been planning a protected downtown network for five years and still has another five to go as it works through transit demands and small business owner fears. New York has a pretty good downtown protected bike network. Did business opposition keep your dedicated bike lanes to streets such as First Avenue along Manhattan’s fringes?
5. What's the secret of building great on-street plazas quickly and inexpensively? (you are famous for building huge plazas all over NYC in order to calm traffic and turn streets into people places. Seattle is still burnishing a few tiny on-street plazas on out of the way streets.)
6. How impressed are you with the changes you've seen around our city since your last visit? It's been a full year since you've returned to Seattle to help usher Seattle into the tactical urbanism era.
7. How do you turn a DOT that's used to 3 or 4-year turnaround times for planning and implementation of major capital projects into a more nimble organization that does tons of small but effective safety improvements?
8. Bike share. Let's say you operated a small bike share system that became insolvent.  You have a choice of expanding the existing system or starting fresh with a stationless system, which would you choose and why? What impeded expanding the NYC bike-sharing network north of 58^thStreet in Manhattan?
9. How did New York buy into Complete Streets ideals?  We hear, “we can't fit all modes on all streets." To some people this means people biking should be pushed to side streets whenever possible and buses should only get priority when it doesn't impede car traffic. What does complete streets mean to you? Should streets that everyone needs to get to because there are many commercial destinations, schools, libraries, etc have access for everyone? And why is the mode that is never removed the car, not transit or biking?
10. How do you gauge the optimal amount of community process?  – In Seattle we sometimes seem to go overboard and other times we barely let people know before making major street improvements. What’s the best way to strike a balance?