This is part 2 of a 2-part series on how a focus on providing transportation options is working in Seattle. Part 1 is here.
Because fewer than 30 percent of work commutes are made by people driving alone, Seattle has become a magnet for business.
It’s home to the national headquarters for Amazon, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, to name just a few.
Jonathan Hopkins, executive director of Commute Seattle – which is funded jointly by King County Metro, the Seattle DOT, and Sound Transit – contrasted the $300,000 spent annually in Seattle for Commute Trip Reduction (CTR) with the “recent experience in Houston” of appropriating $7 billion for 23 new lanes of traffic. Without effective transit management, cities are sent on an endless spiral of new spending and traffic.
“There are only two solutions people know. One is to build more freeways, and that doesn’t work,” said Hopkins, since induced demand has been proven over and over to generate more traffic. The other is transit, but “most cities are coming up short in North America.”
Seattle continues to look towards transit as the right fit, recently passing a $54 billion transit package.
“All of our biggest businesses were in favor of the second largest transportation package the country has ever seen,” Hopkins said. Los Angeles, after decades of hyper car-dependence, is becoming another exception, passing a $120 billion transit-investment plan in 2016. Yet, Hopkins pointed out, “per capita, ours is 60 percent bigger.”
Seattle’s patient, integrated approach has reaped huge economic benefits. The city has been growing 2 to 3 percent annually since 2013. “Name a community that doesn’t want more jobs,” exclaimed Hopkins. (I could mention the degrowth movement, which argues against a philosophy of endless economic expansions, although such thinking is marginal.)
Weyerhauser, a forest products company, is one business that has participated aggressively in Seattle’s CTR program. Prior to its 2016 relocation to a downtown campus, the company had an 82 percent drive-alone rate, according to Commute Seattle. That is now down to 8.9 percent. The new campus has only 64 parking spaces, and these do not fill up.
Other prominent Seattle businesses, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Children’s Hospital, are notable participants in the CTR program. Through this program, businesses are encouraged to collaborate with government to replicate best practices and come up with innovative solutions to how people can rely less on a personal automobile.
“We communicate to employers that it is a value-added program that goes beyond just transportation,” said Cristina VanValkenburgh of the CTR program, in an interview. “It’s about their corporate environmental-sustainability values and it’s about employee attraction and retention.” She added that “we don’t lead with a regulatory stick. We lead our conversation using a business-to-business approach.”
Hopkins said, “For a city to grow past a certain point, to be able to have more people in less space.” This allows a more productive city with “less time spent doing worthless things like driving.”
A program similar to Seattle’s would seem necessary, even before one factors in environmental realities, in order for cities to serve the needs of a growing population. Yet physical reality eventually catches up. Amazon has run out of space in Seattle and is creating a national stir as it searches for a city to locate a second headquarters. Localities are falling all over themselves to lure Amazon; New Jersey, for instance, has offered $7 billion in potential tax breaks.
Such incentives, however, may not prove to be the factor that lures Amazon. The competition will likely be won by a locality that has duplicated the long-term patience and foresight of Seattle in creating a model of transit that provides amenable living conditions.
Doing right by employees, doing right by the city, and doing right by the environment may be the best recipe for economic success.
Photo of pedestrians in downtown Seattle by Nicola/Flickr.
Graphics courtesy of Commute Seattle.