• gordon
• Jan. 10, 2025

Dear Mayor Harrell and Director Quirindongo,

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways would like to offer the following perspective on how the Comprehensive Master Plan update can make every neighborhood a great place to walk, bike, and live.

Increase Walkability

Seattleites love walkable neighborhoods (source). Walking makes us healthier, happier, and more connected to our neighbors through spontaneous interactions (source, source). All of Seattle could become walkable with an ambitious Comprehensive Plan. We could build a city where everyone could walk to grocery stores, child care, parks, coffee shops, restaurants, drug stores, and other daily necessities. This vision remains distant however with a recent analysis finding only 44% of Seattleites can walk to basic daily necessities (source).

While the new neighborhood centers are a good first step, they are too few and too overly constrained. Please restore all the original proposed neighborhood centers and expand them to at least a five minute walk radius.

The new rules surrounding corner stores could also help bring essential services to more neighborhoods, but the proposal should go further. The corner store section should be strengthened to allow for a wider variety of small commercial and community spaces on all lots and eliminate the setback, parking, and other requirements that will hinder their creation.

Enhance Anti-displacement Measures

This comp plan should seek to allow sufficient housing (of all kinds including public, social, cooperative, market rate and more) to end the housing shortage and make Seattle affordable for all. Additionally, the plan should seek to strengthen other anti-displacement measures such as allowing the affordable housing density bonus to be used citywide, without parking mandates.

Reduce exposure to pollution and traffic collisions

The plan includes upzoning of one parcel on either side of some frequent transit corridors. Unfortunately, many of these frequent transit corridors are also some of the most dangerous and polluted streets in our city. 80% of pedestrian fatalities happen on streets with more than one lane of traffic in each direction. And according to the EPA “ health effects that have been associated with proximity to roads include asthma onset and aggravation, cardiovascular disease, reduced lung function, impaired lung development in children, pre-term and low-birthweight infants, childhood leukemia, and premature death. Other than air pollution, road noise may also play a role in the health problems associated with roadway exposure” (source).

Work to decrease pollution and improve traffic safety along these streets is of paramount importance. At the same time, the city must provide more options for people to rent apartments away from arterial streets by extending multifamily zoning along to blocks within a five-minute walk of transit stops.

Protect the Emerald City’s trees

Protecting Seattle’s tree canopy has become a flashpoint in this process, but one solution can be found on our streets, which make up 30% of Seattle's total land area. The comprehensive plan should adopt new policies to encourage more housing while depaving portions of the public right of way for the planting of trees. Paris is planning to remove 60,000 parking spaces and replace them with trees by 2030 (source). Seattle should follow in Paris’ footsteps and find tree planting opportunities that produce co-benefits such as speed management, volume management, buffers from travel lanes, and the creation of community pocket parks.

Sincerely,

Gordon Padelford

Executive Director

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways