This morning we conclude our city-candidate closeups; we took a look at them all before the primary election, and with voting under way now for next Tuesday’s general election, we’re checking back in with the finalists in five city races – mayor and council. We’ve already looked at mayor (Mike McGinn here, Joe Mallahan here), City Council Position 6 (Nick Licata here, Jessie Israel here) and City Council Position 8 (Mike O’Brien here and Robert Rosencrantz here); then it was Council Position 2 (Richard Conlin here and David Ginsberg here), and we’re concluding now with Position 4.

By Jack Mayne
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

City Council Position 4 candidate David Bloom thinks the transit system serving Seattle is in pretty rough shape and would like to see the council pressure the county-run agency to stop being downtown centric and adopt more cross-town service.

“(The City Council) does not run Metro, but we certainly can have strong influence over decisions that are made,” says Bloom, a minister and longtime social-justice activist. “We have bus lines in the city that are running at capacity all the time.”

Bloom sees a problem in Metro’s current method of allocating new bus routes under a 40, 40, 20 system, or 40 percent of buses for east King County, 40 percent for south King County and 20 percent for Seattle. That formula was put in place in the 1990s when the eastern and southern suburbs were growing rapidly and Seattle was not. Now, of course, Seattle is growing at a rate some would say outstrips the Eastside and southern suburbs.

“The other thing is that we are sacrificing bus service in the Rainier Valley (because of) the light rail,” Bloom says. “Metro is cutting back on basic services because of light rail, and that is why I am not a huge fan of light rail. What it seems to be doing is taking away our bus service even though in the Rainier Valley there is heavy reliance by the low-income immigrant refugee community on riding buses. Many of the small businesses depend on the regular bus stops on Rainier Avenue where you have light rail stops over a mile apart which are not conducive to access. It is not well thought out.”

“In terms of West Seattle services, we need more investment in buses, not only going to downtown, but we need more cross-town services,” Bloom says. “Historically the bus system has been downtown-centric, which is not user-friendly to people. It is a combination of how the system is built and the amount of capacity – we don’t have enough capacity. If we had a serious commitment to an integrated bus system, we would have those connectors to the main routes and we would have more buses for RapidRide, we would have neighborhood to neighborhood circulators, all the kinds of things an integrated bus system would have,” he says.

Public bus transit is a series of unconnected parts, he says, listing Sound Transit, Community Transit (Everett), Pierce Transit, “all having some role in providing bus service in the greater Puget Sound area without a clear sense, in my mind, about how all these spokes fit together. I have long advocated for a truly regional integrated transportation system that has a clear vision,” he says. “We don’t have that.”

“West Seattle is somewhat of a community to itself,” Bloom says. “It has a real strong identity. Some of its problems are increasing density and land use issues, housing that is deplorable, transportation particularly between here and downtown and how that is going to resolve with the continuing debate over what kind of replacement we are going to have for the viaduct and whether or not there is going to be an adequate bus system to get people across.” He notes special parking issues for the Junction and the need for small businesses to have accessible parking.

Bloom noted that the South Park Bridge is in serious need of replacement, he says, but there is some craziness to it.

“The county is applying for federal stimulus dollars ($99 million) to help replace the South Park Bridge at the same time that the city, led by the mayor with the acquiescence of the City Council, is also applying for about $50 million of federal stimulus money for the two-way Mercer,” Bloom says.
“We are not going to get them both. There is a perfect example of a lack of coordination on critical infrastructure needs. The more critical need is the South Park Bridge, but the mayor and Vulcan and a bunch of other folks really like the two way Mercer. They already tried to get stimulus money for Mercer and failed.” (Vulcan is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s company.)

Bloom says his understanding is that the Mercer project does not rise to the level of need that the South Park Bridge does. “It does not make sense for the city and the county to be competing for limited dollars.” He says the Mercer project is way too expensive. “They are spending $300 million without really improving traffic flow.”

Bloom says the deep-bore tunnel to replace the Central Waterfront section of the viaduct is a “bad investment” but he sees no other way to solve the problem. While the project may be a fait accompli, Bloom says it is the No. 1 issue that comes up in the campaign.

Despite all the problems, he says people seem to want the tunnel. “My guess is that if, for some reason, the tunnel project falls apart, the Legislature will fix Highway 99 some way,” he says. “There is no perfect solution or we would not be having this debate.”

Bloom says we don’t know if the traffic could be accommodated in I-5 and downtown without problems.

“Maybe we ought to close the viaduct for a month and see what happens,” he says. But he also says he would keep his eye on the project, looking for solutions that don’t involve a deep-bore tunnel.

Bloom says he is not dead set against using tolls to finance projects but that it has to be used judiciously and “in a way that makes sense to users. I have heard it said that if the tunnel is tolled, then people will just use surface streets to avoid tolls,” Bloom says.

Bloom charges the Nickels administration has “pretty much ignored the neighborhood plans and given rezones and up-zones and allowed things to happen that were not part of the neighborhood plans.”

He thinks the process of a decade ago where the plans were written by the people in the various neighborhoods is the correct way to rewrite the plans; Mayor Greg Nickels wanted to rewrite them with city government driving the process – a process that ran into trouble with some on the Council.

David Bloom’s page in the online city Voters’ Guide (text and video) is here. His campaign website is here.