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More sidewalks? Depends on who’s paying

Forget it!
A national survey shows that people strongly favor the development of communities with lots of sidewalks. But ask voters — and especially motorists — to actually pay to make that happen, and you get a very different answer.

Such was the case in Burien where, earlier this month, residents voted on whether vehicle owners should pay an extra $25 car-tab fee to fund the construction of sidewalks and bike lanes. It was the first time a Washington city has voted on taxing cars to pay for such amenities, according to a Seattle Times article.

In a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by the National Association of Realtors and Smart Growth America, more than 80 percent of respondents favored building more walkable communities. Based on these results, which were published in the January 2008 issue of Realtor magazine, you’d think that Burien voters would have delivered a slam-dunk win for the suburb’s bicyclists and pedestrians.

But you’d be wrong. A whopping 74 percent of voters rejected the proposition.

Members of the City Council could have OK’d a $20 fee without going to the voters, but asked for $25. “We need to know what our community wants to do,” Mayor Joan McGilton told the Times.

City Hall clearly found out.

Marc Stiles covers transportation for the DJC.

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This entry was posted by Marc Stiles on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Government, Neighborhoods, Parks and open space, Planning, Politics, transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • mhays

    Seattle would likely be different. Let us vote on a pedestrian-focused measure, perhaps in the $20 million per year range, and I bet it would pass. That amount would give us sidewalks on arterials, school routes, and various missing links in reasonably short order. Add bike routes to the list and…it would get a lot more contentious while picking up a significant constituency.

    In my wildest tax-increasing liberal dreams, we’d vote on a $100 million per year Seattle levy to massively increase in-city bus service, quickly get sidewalks on every street (heard an $800m figure once), widen existing sidewalks, build skybridges over freeways, and establish a new jail for drivers who park on sidewalks. Even if residents directly paid the whole amount (vs. businesses), that would be average $167 per person $333 per household per year on average. That’s nearly nothing compared to the benefit in my opinion.