Traffic study proves Seattle’s priorities are misguided

Taken from Thursday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

We’re seeing all kinds of propaganda being pushed out by the city.

There’s a study that suggests there are fewer solo drivers going in to downtown Seattle – that 31 percent of the people who work in downtown Seattle are driving there alone. A couple of years ago it was 34 percent. So the city is holding this up as a shining beacon and they’re saying, look we have more people taking mass transit.

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A couple of things are really interesting in this study. All the money that we’re spending on bike lanes – we’re tearing up streets, we are eliminating car traffic lanes – the percentage of bicycle commuters has actually gone down the last couple of years. It’s a shockingly tiny number; 3.1 percent of commuters get there by bicycle. Two years ago, it was 3.3 percent.

Think about that. The city of Seattle is spending $40 million on bike lanes and bike tracks and things they’re building just for bicyclists. And it’s to serve 3 percent of the population. This is a stunning lack of prioritization by the transportation planners in this region. But then they hold up the stat that we’ve got fewer people driving alone into downtown Seattle – we’re down to 31 percent.

We have 10 times the number of solo driver car commuters than bicyclists. And what are they doing? They’re taking away lanes to give to those bicyclists. That’s not the way to prioritize.

They have an incentive to make traffic as horrible as possible so they can achieve their social engineering goals of forcing people out of their cars onto mass transit. So as they’re hailing this as some kind of triumph, the stats that are important is we are spending so much money on the bicycle community and the percentage of bike commuters is going down. It’s not doing anything to encourage people to ride their bikes.

Taken from Thursday’s edition of KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

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