Yesterday, Mayor-elect Katie Wilson announced Angela Brady will be the next Interim Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Since 2022, Brady has served as Director of Seattle’s Office of the Waterfront, Civic Projects & Sound Transit. In the statement announcing the change, Wilson touted Brady’s “strong operational expertise” and said Brady “is committed to addressing our maintenance backlog, and shares my vision of world-class transit, a citywide network of protected bike lanes, safe and accessible sidewalks, great pedestrian spaces, and housing-rich neighborhoods packed with amenities.”
Prior to her current role, Brady was the Deputy Director of Design and Delivery for the Waterfront Program. While not perfect (largely due to minimum lane requirements from WSDOT), the revamped waterfront is a significant improvement over the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Before working on the waterfront, Brady oversaw Seattle’s Mercer Corridor Project as a Supervising Program Manager at SDOT. The Mercer Corridor Project revamped Mercer St in South Lake Union and Lower Queen Anne to contain several lanes of eastbound and westbound vehicles. Other than a two-way protected bike lane under SR-99, the project had few transit, bike, or pedestrian focused improvements.
While the projects on Brady’s resume may not align with Wilson’s vision for a truly multi-modal city, her experience working with and for SDOT will ensure a smooth transition for the agency. During the next few months, Wilson’s team will continue the search for a permanent SDOT Director who will be more aligned with Wilson’s transportation priorities.
A few things I’m wondering about Brady.
Is she gung ho on Denny Way transit lanes? Is she interested in pedestrianizing part of Lake Washington Blvd and Pike Place after all? Does she have any new ideas to improve bus reliability and frequency? Can she help speed up the buses on Pike-Pine that became unreliable with the rechannelization and adding a stoplight/stop sign on every block? What will she recommend about Link issues? What are her thoughts on the renovated Mercer being so wide and trafficky for pedestrians crossing it?
It seems like the mayor-elect had a couple different directions to go with this pick. She could pick someone within the department (including the active head) because they know a lot of the inner workings of the agency. The other option is to pick someone who is on the same page when it comes to priorities and she finds easy to work with. She went with the second option. I have to assume based on that — and statements the mayor-elect has made — that they share the same goals and vision for Seattle.
Thus I think it is highly likely Brady wants to continue adding bus lanes aggressively throughout Seattle (including on Denny). Same goes for bike lanes on Washington Blvd, a car-free Pike Place, etc. I think the differences (if there are any) are bound to be on the edges. For example the streetcar. Or the various issues surrounding Link expansion. These are issues that divide transit advocates and Wilson’s comments on both have been relatively vague (which is a good thing in my opinion — I would much rather have someone who understands subtlety than someone stubbornly committed to a project regardless of its efficacy).
I would also assume that she will have someone under her who knows SDOT really well. It is great to have plans but at some point you need to implement them. Managing the agency is arguably more important than your vision. It is best if you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the agency when attempting to improve their work.
These interim appointments are always a mess, having worked for SDOT. The interim director simply maintains the status quo until a final appointment is made. We saw this with other interim appointments like Linea Laird who also lead mega projects within WSDOT. What happens each time is that by the time a non-interim director is appointed, there are only a couple years to deliver on the mayor’s vision. And with the city’s penchant for voting new mayors every four years, nothing drastic really happens.
Good point. I didn’t realize that she is another interim appointment. It is strange to replace one interim appointment with another. I guess the incoming mayor isn’t that happy with the current interim SDOT chief (Emery). Or maybe Emery didn’t want to continue in that roll (even temporarily). It is also possible that Wilson wants Brady as the permanent head (although she gave no hints of that).
The sense I got is that Brady is more aligned with Wilson, so whatever influence Emery had, Brady will have, too.
It seems like the one of the few hard stances Wilson has taken is a desire to put more bus lanes on Denny. It’s been speculated that Emery influenced SDOT’s push against them, so I’ll speculate that Wilson wanted to replace Emery with someone who would support that vision.
In the meantime, I expect there will be another national search for an SDOT Director. Hopefully it concludes sooner rather than later.
IIRC, I read Emery was very close to Harrell
Emery was deputy mayor for Harrell before she was SDOT interim director. So I am not surprised she was let go. She’s also the target of a lot of “urbanist” ire. Katie seems hell-bent on red paint for Denny, among other things. Guessing she needed someone who was eager to go along.
I’d agree with this. As an incoming mayor, Wilson only has the time and political energy to drastically change a couple of departments. SDOT might not make the first cut… and if that doesn’t happen SDOT will likely just slog along as usual.
This is also the most important thing to remember about Sound Transit. It’s controlled by an appointed board of largely elected officials with super busy “day jobs” that prevent the board from really focusing on Sound Transit. The organizational chart ST is structured to resist change.
An SDOT leader willing to bend the curve to make transit/bike/walk-ability improvements faster and better as the norm is a welcome change. SDOT employees may resist changes from interim leaders, but I have worked with a number of SDOT engineers and techs who bike, transit, walk and welcomed Vision 0 changes. Hopefully non-car-dependent SDOT employees didn’t all leave under the Mayor H’s purge of SDOT director Gregg Spotts. I’d love to get Gregg Spotts back as director, or at least someone with his focus on safety and willingness to listen to transit users, bikers, and walkers. Mayor Wilson will need to set clear expectations that SDOT’s default car-dependent decisions need to be thoroughly examined and that transit/bike/walk-ability improvements should not be delayed the moment some car-dependent whiner raises a fuss.
jmath,
I don’t have much insight on SDOT’s inner workings. Some parts of the City government are much easier to change than others. Some of what any new mayor needs to do is look for anybody already in City government who is willing to work with the mayor’s new vision, or maybe even not actively oppose it. How easy would it be to wrangle SDOT into a new direction without a massive purge that just burns so much energy and time that the mayor is out of office before any of the changes actually happen?
Regarding the Mercer project’s “few” bike/ped/transit improvements, the Mercer/Aurora area is far from an urbanist paradise today, but it’s easy to forget just how awful the infrastructure was 15 years ago. Multi-lane one-way couplets with some of the most stressful bike lanes in the city. Underpasses with narrow, dark, noisy sidewalks where you’d get splashed with water from passing cars. No way to cross 99 between Denny and that awful complex of underpasses. Multiple blocks sacrificed for the Broad Street trench and ramps to access it. Bus routes made circuitous and confusing by the irregular 99 crossings — in particular routes serving Seattle Center like the old 16 and 30.
New Mercer still serves a mostly car-oriented function, being the giant queue that cars sit on to get to I-5, but a lot of the bad old stuff that made the whole area so pedestrian-hostile is gone. Some streets are just going to serve those car-oriented functions until we make higher-level decisions to de-prioritize cars. The Mercer Project wasn’t a radical transformation striking a blow against car dependency but as a “reformist” type of change that made better urbanism possible and kept future improvements on the table I think it was pretty good.
(I’m a lot more critical of the 99 work — you can’t fully separate the 99 project from the Mercer project but to the extent you can separate them, more of the stuff that makes me mad is more on the 99 side.)
This begs another question, whether there should, long term, be a bus route on Mercer. One could imagine a route from Seattle Center to U district via Mercer and Eastlake, for example.
Today, the biggest obstacle is that there is insufficient ridership to justify two routes on Eastlake, and a bus to downtown is higher on the priority list than a bus to Seattle Center. Even though, from the perspective of someone in the U district, a 70 to downtown is redundant with Link, while a 70 to Seattle Center would complement Link very nicely.
Of course, unpredictable traffic on Mercer is another issue.
Crazy idea but for these highly congested inner east-west routes (Denny or Mercer), perhaps an elevated busway with several stations could be an option for key segments, could even work with the topography coming off the steep Capitol Hill.
Mexico City recently built Trolebus Elevado an elevated busway operated with trolley buses, but it also could work like Van Ness in SF with a busway just in a critical segment of a larger route.
One could imagine a route from Seattle Center to U district via Mercer and Eastlake, for example.
I am pretty sure a planner I know suggested that.
Mercer is used for express buses but I think they immediately get on Fairview. I would actually take the opposite approach (as I suggested above). Let Mercer be the car street. Put bus lanes everywhere else (starting with Denny). I would add bus lanes to Valley (while the bike lanes move replace the streetcar tracks close to the lake). If we had an east-west bus in the area then I think it makes sense to use Roy and 5th (https://maps.app.goo.gl/c3uTwbSjzVdRWbHU6). Mercer is one of the last streets I would modify (or even use) for transit.
“the Mercer/Aurora area is far from an urbanist paradise today, but it’s easy to forget just how awful the infrastructure was 15 years ago.”
Me and my friends joked for years “friends don’t let friends take Mercer” whether biking, walking, or driving. Especially between Westlake and Fairview.
This more or less used to exist; albeit via Westlake. It didn’t run very often. I think the schedule invariability would be worse than the 8 between Queen Anne Ave and 99.
I feel the opposite. There were a few good things with the Mercer project but the main goal was to move more cars. When people referred to the “Mercer Mess” (that this was supposed to solve) it was cars stuck in traffic (not lack of bike or pedestrian infrastructure). It was the type of project that I just can’t imagine now.
In contrast the second tunnel was designed to carry fewer cars than the viaduct. The assumption was that if we didn’t build the tunnel, there would be gridlock. This wasn’t true of course but it isn’t a crazy assumption. The biggest drawback to the tunnel is that it cost too much. Otherwise it isn’t bad at all. Putting cars underground is ideal. You’ve opened up parts of Aurora. Exits to the left (downtown) are crazy but if we actually have center running buses it will be ideal.
Likewise the waterfront is definitely overbuilt. Too many lanes where they really don’t need them (close to Pike Place). But a lot of those lanes are meant to handle the backup to the ferries and there is no easy solution to that. The waterfront is now really attractive and it isn’t hard to think of it being much nice in the future. I don’t really see that with Mercer (or will be the last place that becomes pedestrian friendly). I’m actually OK with that. It is one of the big arguments for bus lanes on Denny. Mercer is for cars. Eventually, if the rest of the city becomes like Amsterdam then I could see a lot fewer cars there.
I’d be shocked if Mercer today moved many more cars than it used to. The big bottleneck isn’t any part of Mercer, it’s getting cars through the big light at Mercer/Fairview onto I-5. If they actually wanted to move a lot more cars they’d have to bypass that.
The deal was a wider, two-way Mercer handling both directions of through-traffic in exchange for a narrower, slower, two-way version of Valley and Roy, and getting rid of the Broad Street underpass. I don’t drive in that area much, but I’d be surprised if it’s not significantly slower today to drive from I-5 to Seattle Center today, via Mercer, than it used to be via Broad. That was a good deal. Mercer still sucks but with the other streets nearby made more walkable, and with more buildings full of human activity now being built over the grave of Broad Street, there are more people that can use the area as something more than just a place to drive through.
And reconnecting John, Thomas, and Harrison across Aurora. Thus giving better pedestrian access between the Seattle Center area and SLU.
If I learned anything from the Kubly experience, it’s that I’d rather have a competent, drama free bureaucrat than a wide-eyed visionary (even one I agree with) who’s gonna end up trashing the place.
“Bus routes made circuitous and confusing by the irregular 99 crossings — in particular routes serving Seattle Center like the old 16 and 30.”
I thought about the 16 when I replied about all the bus routes to Seattle Center as a less expensive alternative to the Monorail. There’s the D, 1, 2, 4, 13, 24, 33. There used to also be the 6 and 16. The 6 is now RapidRide E, and the 16 is the 62. The net effect is there used to be four routes to the east side of Seattle Center: 3, 4, 6, and 16. The #3 runs are simply renumbered to 4, so no change there, but the 6 and 16 runs are gone, or at least, no longer get so close to Seattle Center.
The 6 obviously needed to be moved because it took so long to get from downtown to northern Aurora or Snohomish County. But the 62 is not as long north-south, so it was less necessary to move it. The move does mean fewer runs to 5th Ave N. This raises the questions, why was it moved, and why was it on 5th Ave N in the first place?
Al Diamond says it had to to weave around the highway infrastructure to get to Aurora. But I always thought it was to get more service to Seattle Center because a lot of people went there, and to get to the Center from Aurora or east Greenlake or Northgate. In other words, the way the U-District has routes from several directions. That may have seemed like an important thing during the World’s Fair and its legacy and all the multipurpose activities at the Center.
The 30 I remember in the 80s going from Laurelhurst west on 45th and south on Fremont Avenue, and I think some daytime runs continued to Magnolia. Did it go to Seattle Center? Or was that the later 30 derived from the 74 on NE 55th? I never paid much attention to how those routes got to Seattle Center. I assumed it was the same way the 32 does now, or close enough to not make a difference. I don’t remember any of these routes being on 5th Ave N.
In any case, it’s not true that the 6 and 16 had to use 5th Ave N to get to Aurora. The 5 went on Dexter and got to Aurora on John Street from the east. So the 6 and 16 could have done that too if they didn’t need to serve Seattle Center. Regarding that John alignment, that never made sense to me, because Aurora was designed with a big entrance/exit at Denny Way one block south, and why didn’t the 5 use that?
The version of the 30 I’m thinking of was indeed the NE 55th version. It didn’t do what the 32 does now. Heading south/west, after crossing the Fremont Bridge it took Westlake and then used Broad Street to go to Seattle Center. On the way back north/east it used Mercer. The Broad and Mercer stuff made it a pretty weird route — one you might want to take over short distances because walking across 99 sucked so much, but it wasn’t frequent and had confusing stop locations.
It’s possible the 5 took Dexter and John at some point but… didn’t it typically take the more direct route of Wall (southbound) and Battery (northbound)? The 16 served Seattle Center, and it often took a long time to get between the Center and Aurora, especially northbound. Sometimes people that want to get between Ballard and downtown complain about the D Line taking the slow way through LQA instead of taking Denny to Elliott. For people traveling between Wallingford and downtown the 16’s Seattle Center detour was a much worse version of this. Because crossing Aurora on foot to get to the Center was so bad it was more important to have routes between the north end and the Center like the 16 and 30 then than it is now, but anyone not going to the Center suffered more for it.