Here’s Steve Cuddy‘s full “letter to the editor” explanation of the Alki Elementary appeal and his decision not to challenge the ruling:

In answer to your question, I do not personally plan to appeal the Alki Elementary case further. It is possible that others in our “Friends” group may decide to appeal to Court, but so far no one has, and I would be surprised if anyone does.
As you likely remember from the hearing, our “Friends” appeal group strongly supports a new Alki Elementary school. We appealed to request a new school that remained approximately the same size as the old School (rather than a new school doubled in size), so that previously unaddressed dangerous traffic at the school could be better managed going forward.

Regardless of the Hearing Examiner’s decision, the District’s intention to double Alki school size (from 300 to 600 persons) remains a problem. While we all hope that people will find ways to reduce their reliance on cars, the reality is that wet weather, poor public transit, steep area hills, reduced school bussing, and work/family/time demands have long caused most Alki Elementary parents to drive their kids to/from school. District and SDOT surveys over the past couple of decades confirm that a consistently strong majority of Alki Elementary kids arrive and leave by car each day. This reality, plus parking scarcity on nearby crowded streets, already produced dangerous parking and traffic problems at the previous smaller Alki school of about 300 students. Although it would be nice, none of the conditions that have caused parents to choose to drive their kids to Alki Elementary are likely to change any time soon, which assures increased parking and traffic hazards at the new 600+ person Alki school.

Traffic cannot help but become more congested and dangerous at the larger school because existing Alki area street and pedestrian infrastructure cannot change much to accommodate the far larger numbers of cars and pedestrians that will daily converge on the school at start and end times. Of course, those most at risk are the kids.

Because most available parking is located West of the School, most people must reach the School and Playfield via the school’s crosswalks at 59th and Stevens. So far, the District’s plan is to increase school size to over 600 students and staff, and at school drop and pickup times route hundreds of them as pedestrians and cyclists (mostly young families and unaccompanied children) over the same school crosswalks where – at the same time – the District will also route hundreds of parents’ cars.

*This plan will funnel hundreds of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars over the same intersections and crosswalks twice-a-day, 5-days-a-week, 9 months of the year. It will produce tens of thousands of pedestrian-vehicle interactions a year on already congested streets, which is bound to lead to a bad result. Our appeal sought to avoid these increased risks by keeping the school at about the same size, and requiring more effective traffic management than has occurred there in the past.
While we were not successful with the second appeal, there were some positive results:

-The members of our group who filed the first successful appeal gained 15 off-street parking spots, which will be available to more safely accommodate ADA and special needs students than the dangerous on-street parking for them that was originally proposed by the School District.

-The second appeal forced the School District to finally admit that Alki Elementary’s past traffic and parking problems were serious, and that its previous traffic management
arrangements at the school were inadequate and dangerous.
-As a consequence of that admission, for the second appeal, the District created a draft traffic management plan in advance of school construction. I do not believe this has ever happened before. The District’s draft traffic management plan has significant problems (* see above), but it is at least an advance start on what will be a difficult task. (Prior to the second appeal, the District’s position was to deny that there were significant parking or traffic problems at the old Alki School that warranted advance consideration for a much larger school.)

-Friends appeal witnesses respectfully offered a broad range of detailed evidence with information about past parking and traffic safety problems at Alki School, neighborhood infrastructure limitations, and suggestions for future improvements. Some of the information and ideas were clearly new to the District, and will help it better address the increased traffic safety issues and risks for Alki Elementary and Playfield that a much larger new school will bring.

This is some progress, but a good final result will require continued community involvement.

The District’s current draft traffic management plan for a much larger Alki Elementary will direct all school parents’ cars West down Admiral Hill past 59th to 60th, then North on 60th to Stevens, then East on Stevens to the School, then North on 59th. There will be consideration of making 60th, Stevens, and 59th temporarily one-way streets during morning and afternoon school start and end times.

My understanding is that the School District and SDOT will convene public meetings at some point to discuss the evolving Alki School traffic management plan, and get public/community input for it. I encourage anyone who is interested to participate in that process. Local knowledge can help ensure the best result.

The School District plans to rely on SDOT to help it fashion a final traffic management plan for the much larger Alki school. While we might hope that SDOT’s involvement will help produce a good plan, my own experiences with SDOT involving traffic safety near the school have been hugely disappointing.

The recent appeal was not my first neighborhood effort to make traffic safer for families and kids around Alki School. I worked several times with SDOT over the past 20 years to convince them to install the traffic humps on 59th in front of the school, the 10 mph speed limit signs in alleys near the school, and the stop signs for the School’s crosswalks.

Each of those efforts took over a year to accomplish, mainly because SDOT strongly resisted each one. SDOT instead insisted on its “one-size-fits-all” City-wide norms, which then disfavored traffic-calming measures on neighborhood streets – even at critical school intersections and crosswalks.

My experience has been that SDOT’s is usually inclined to discount local knowledge and evidence warranting deviation from its standard policies, when its standard policies do not fit the specific realities of a local neighborhood. For example, SDOT actually required Alki neighborhood residents to raise $6,000 to pay for the Alki School traffic humps on 59th, which we did.

In the several Alki School area traffic safety improvement efforts that I was involved with, the neighborhood sought very sensible SDOT safety measures to protect vulnerable school kids and park families. In each case, SDOT denied there was a problem and drug their feet – for over a year. It took two nearby traffic deaths (one about 75 yards from the school’s crosswalks) and a serious child bike-car injury accident in an alley near the school, to convince SDOT to deviate from its standard policies and allow the traffic humps, the school crosswalk stop signs, and the nearby alley slow speed limit signs. That kind of delay with those consequences should be unacceptable to us all.

The recent appeal challenged the School District’s similar denial that there were serious traffic problems at the old Alki School, which warranted both consideration to deviate from its “standard plan” to build only very large elementary schools, and advance planning to prevent deaths and injuries from the increased pedestrian and cyclist traffic hazards that a far larger Alki School will inevitably bring.

So, my several experiences with both SDOT and the School District have been that neither agency takes traffic risks very seriously until something bad happens, at least if preventive measures require them to deviate from their “standard plans.” They seem to disregard neighborhood input and local knowledge as either unreliable, self-serving, or unduly alarmist – even when it is sincere and factually accurate – as were both Alki Elementary appeals.

With that history in mind, I encourage all who may have an interest or information to actively participate in the SDOT-School District traffic planning process for Alki Elementary. It really could make a difference and save lives.

Citizens should also know that City Code changes are under consideration by the Mayor and City Council would eliminate entirely the current requirement for the School District to demonstrate that its building projects will have safe parking and traffic circulation patterns. The proposal is apparently based on the assumption that “NIMBY’s” who live near schools raise specious traffic safety claims as a “pretext” to oppose changes in their neighborhood. That was certainly not the case with our appeal.

If the City’s current safe parking and traffic requirement for new school buildings is repealed, Citizens would have to rely entirely on the School District and SDOT to “do the right thing” in affected Seattle neighborhoods. SDOT and the District’s disappointing history of resistance to taking traffic safety seriously in the Alki neighborhood leads me to believe that the City should keep its current safe traffic requirement for school projects – especially now that the District has clearly announced a “standard plan” to close small elementary schools and build only much larger ones everywhere in the City.

Kind regards,
Steve Cuddy