Mayor Durkan decides on repairing West Seattle Bridge instead of immediate replacement

This morning Mayor Durkan announced that the city will move forward with repairing the cracked main span of the West Seattle Bridge, with the expectation that it will reopen by mid-2022, restore the bridge to its original expected lifetime, and push out building a replacement for up to 40 years. However, she also said that SDOT will start studying an eventual replacement strategy now, and it will approach Sound Transit about jointly building a third span to West Seattle that could incorporate light rail, bicycles and pedestrians.

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Audit on SDOT’s bridge maintenance finds program vastly underfunded, lack of strategic plan

Two weeks ago the City Auditor released a report on vehicle bridge maintenance in Seattle. The report, which was commissioned by Council member Alex Pedersen following the closure of the West Seattle Bridge earlier this year, highlights a point SCC insight reported earlier this year: that SDOT’s bridge maintenance budget is only a fraction of the recommended amount. However, the Auditor cautions that before the Mayor and City Council try to increase the budget, SDOT needs to get its house in order to make sure that the money is well-spent and the work is done well.

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New report presents clearer picture on e-scooter safety issues

Last May, I wrote an article discussing the safety of e-scooters, as Seattle was beginning to discuss a scooter-share program modeled after its existing bike-share program, and as other cities aggressively rolled out scooter share. My conclusion was that there simply was not enough data to draw a definitive answer on e-scooter safety, though the early results presented reasons to be concerned. Now, as Seattle is well on its way to rolling out scooter-share later this spring, a new report on scooter injuries nationwide in 2018 brings us a bigger data set — and fresh reasons to be concerned.

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