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Olympians Urge City to Reassess Transportation Plans

by Larry Leveen

Challenging growth assumptions seems like Olympia's favorite pastime lately. From LOTT rates to School Impact Fees, citizens are bringing up the fiscal, environmental and lifestyle effects of growth. These are worthwhile issues to debate, since they are the underpinnings of how our communities develop and our quality-of-life is affected.

Another piece of the poorly understood growth-and-development puzzle is the Capital Facilities Plan. The CFP, a portion of the larger municipal Comprehensive Plan, specifically addresses which capital projects will be built, and when, as well as how each project will be paid for. The City of Olympia is currently involved in updating its six-year 2001-2006 CFP, and concerned citizens like myself have been wading into the information and crunching numbers in order to interpret what the proposed CFP will mean for our community.

The results were disturbing, so we took our finding to the Olympia Planning Commission's recent hearing on the Comprehensive Plan amendments. Our testimony focused on the Transportation portion of the CFP.

Multi-modal LOS: A Better Analysis Tool LOS failure - driver delay at an intersection - is the only trigger to spending Transportation Impact Fee dollars. Olympia has no multi-modal LOS standard, which might direct such impact fee monies to provide, say, sidewalks on a street that is adequate for motorists, but substandard for pedestrians. Consider the example of 9th Avenue SW. Ninth Avenue connects a growing neighborhood with a major commercial/retail center and access to transit. The road surface has been in poor shape, flooding during the rainy season, and sidewalks were not contiguous along its length (a sidewalk was added on the North side of the 9th Avenue recently, but the street is still not up to City standards). Despite all this, Transportation Impact Fees paid by the homeowners in the new developments in the area, could not be used to solve 9th Avenue's problems because the roadway was not failing its adopted motorized LOS. The residents, pedestrians, cyclists, transit users and motorists alike are not being served by this odd set of rules. Development creates trips by all modes, so shouldn't analysis of our transportation system's deficiencies take into account all modes as well? The Olympia Planning Commission thinks so, and has made Multi-modal LOS a priority work item for next year.

Level of Service Analysis: The Transportation One-Trick-Pony

In deciding which road projects to do, the City uses an analysis tool called a "Level of Service." An LOS is essentially the length of a delay the city will tolerate for drivers at an intersection on a given road. When drivers have to wait beyond a certain amount of time, the roadway "fails" the LOS adopted for it in the City's Comprehensive Plan (different roads may have different adopted LOS thresholds). When a road fails its LOS, the City is required by state law (the Growth Management Act) to address the issue.

Usually, the result is a "capacity improvement" or road widening. Such projects are quite often costly in dollars as well as environmental and cultural impact. To make things worse, the expenditure of millions of dollars is triggered when LOS fails for just two hours a day (the rest of the day, the roadway meets or exceeds its LOS).

When the knee-jerk reaction is road widening, we remove the incentive to utilize other resources at our disposal, such as higher occupancy travel modes and travel at non-peak times of day (flextime and compressed work week are examples of strategies using non-peak times of day). Furthermore, we irreparably alter the landscape, which impacts both the environment as well as the human experience in the area, discouraging alternate mode use.

Recently, there has been a lot of research into "induced travel." It's been shown that by increasing roadway capacity we provide some immediate congestion relief. But shortly thereafter, the increased capacity encourages new trips, simply using up all the capacity it provided. Ironically, we are "driving" people into car use by the way we address congestion.

Mud Bay Phase Two: The Trick We Could All Do Without

Up to a year or so ago, Mud Bay Road, was primarily a two-lane street with wide shoulders. Phase One of the project, widened the stretch from Cooper Point Road to Yauger Way, to four (and sometimes 5) lanes with bike lanes and sidewalks. One could argue that at least Phase One served people who live in the city by increasing their access to the medical complex on Yauger. Phase Two is more problematic, however.

1. It widens the road to 4/5 lanes from Yauger Way to the city limits (currently at Kaiser Road), but is paid for by a combination of residential development impact fees collected in Olympia, leveraging federal grants. Geographically speaking, though, the project serves those outside the City who do not help pay for its cost.
   
   This equity problem is exacerbated by a recent court decision which prevents the City from collecting impact fees from development in its "Urban Growth Management Area," the area where the City is likely to grow to, but which is outside of today's City Limits. This project will enable sprawl in and outside of the City.
2. The City's Capital Facilities Plan, which should be a real and balanced budgeting tool, over-commits transportation impact fee money (collected from new development). The six-year CFP lists $8.8 million dollars of impact fees in various transportation projects. The City is only collecting about $600,000 per year in applicable impact fees, however, which yields an approximate deficit of $5.2 million.
3. The Green Cove area, which is adjacent to the project, may be "down-zoned" (re-zoned so development is less dense) by the City due to environmental impact of an important watershed. The collection of impact fees will decline as a result of such a down-zone. Without a corresponding increase in impact fees for the area, the City will have fewer dollars to pay for the road project.
   
   Would the area develop with higher impact fees? Would the double effect of less density (fewer people) and slower development due to higher impact fees still provide the "demand" for the road widening?
   
   The City must tighten up its analysis of the situation and reassess impact fees if it expects to continue with the project, otherwise, we'll have fewer dollars than projected to do the project (of dubious need).
4. This widening is seen as a "free" project by some staff and City officials, since the general fund is not affected. This is overly simplistic - there is always an opportunity cost for doing something: environmental impact, ruining the character of a "sub-suburban" area, city staff time used on the project, failing to do other impact fee fundable projects that better serve the city, etc.
   
   With one-dimensional LOS analysis, there is inadequate work being done on analyzing how this project harmonizes or conflicts with the City's adopted Comprehensive Plan goals and policies (see "Multi-Modal LOS," left).
5. There are other projects that the City could and should use the Impact Fee money for. Consider the Fourth Avenue Bridge, the main link between the West Side and downtown. The $2 million in Impact Fees going into Mud Bay Phase Two, a bad project supporting driving and sprawl on the outskirts of town, could go to the bridge, a good project, supporting realistic multi-modal travel to and from the heart of the City. This would free up $2 million in city cash tied up in the bridge during a time of serious financial duress.
   
   The City struggles with how to pay for all of our transportation needs, yet there are $2 million dollars staring it in the face. It's a no-brainer - we should serve mobility to the core of the City first, as the spirit of our Comprehensive Plan calls for. We can use the $2 million towards anything from the City's Least Cost Pavement Management Strategy, to the 150-200 year estimated sidewalk-funding deficit. The City's needs list is long, and Mud Bay Phase Two is nowhere near the top of it.
6. City analysis of transportation projects is so out of whack that the Capital Facilities Plan actually claims that Mud Bay Phase Two will reduce car dependency simply by virtue of the bike lanes and sidewalks that will be installed.
   
   This blatantly ignores that the shoulders currently in place offer more space to cyclists than the bike lanes will and that because of the rural-suburban character of the area (long distances and lack of services), there is little pedestrian demand. What little pedestrian demand that exists can be adequately served by the existing shoulders - let frontage improvements from new development (which could create significant pedestrian travel) pay for the sidewalks.
   
   I'm a huge supporter of non-motorized travel, but there are simply much higher non-motorized needs in the City than Mud Bay Phase Two. Claiming that this project will reduce car dependency is nothing short of an insult to Olympia citizens. #}

   Olympia Planning Commission Rises to the Challenge - Will Council?

   Fortunately the voice of reason has been heard by one of the City's main "ears" - the Olympia Planning Commission. Following a hearing at which I and others testified, The Commission voted unanimously to recommend to the City Council to move Mud Bay Phase Two to the last year of the CFP, and to initiate lowering the LOS of the road (a larger process involving Thurston Regional Planning Council). This is a bold step, but a necessary one - the CFP should not be made and funded in a vacuum, but must always serve the Comprehensive Plan goals and policies.

   We need expenditures to be made in a rational way that take into account community needs and values beyond the one-dimensional motorized LOS. We will get more bang for the buck, protect the environment, and foster a vibrant downtown and livable community. Kudos to the Olympia Planning Commission for their thoughtful work and bold recommendations.

   Your help is needed, however. The City Council needs to hear from the public, either in writing or in person at the upcoming CFP Public Hearing on Tuesday, October 17, at 7 p.m. Tell the Council that the Planning Commission recommendations are excellent and should be implemented with the utmost speed and sincerity by the City. Inform them that we deserve more than the one-trick-pony of motorized LOS analysis, and that Mud Bay Phase Two is a trick we can all do without.

   Larry Leveen serves as an officer on the Board of the Northwest Olympia Neighborhood Association and Chairs the City of Olympia Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee.

   
   

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