Yesterday, we sat down with Seattle Department of Transportation director Grace Crunican at her office on the 38th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower, across the street from City Hall. Crunican announced late last month that she would not stay on as SDOT chief under new mayor Mike McGinn; sources close to the administration say McGinn's transportation advisers advised against retaining Crunican. Crunican told PubliCola she will be starting her own transportation consulting firm.

Crunican, whom Nickels appointed in 2002, became a controversial figure in recent years, due to her handling of last year's snowstorm and her decision to promote street maintenance manager Paul Jackson despite documented problems with his management style. In fact, she became an issue in this year's mayoral election when candidate Joe Mallahan said he would fire her. McGinn tepidly seconded the idea.

We talked to Crunican about her accomplishments during eight years in office, her regrets, and her vision for the future of transportation in the city.



PubliCola: We'll start with a softball. After eight years, what do you see as your biggest accomplishments as transportation director?

Crunican: My biggest accomplishment was changing the transportation template from an organization that was primarily for cars to one that is focused on moving people and goods. When I got here in 2002, the organization was focused on the automobile exclusively. That has shifted.  [Mayor Greg Nickels] helped get the light rail line built. He got one streetcar built and another one funded. Sound Transit now has commuter rail lines running all over the city.

We have a bike plan and a pedestrian master plan. We have 90 miles of bike lanes and sharrows [lane markings that let cars known when cyclists may be present]. I understand that the bike people don’t like sharrows as much as bike lanes,but when I started here, people were saying, "Why are you taking lanes away from cars"

Then we passed Bridging the Gap [a $365 million, nine-year levy for transportation passed in 2006], and it included major funding for [sidewalks] and bike lanes. People in the community said, "More transit, more bikes," and we felt we had the voters' support to do more pedestrian and more bikes.

PubliCola: Folks in the bike advocacy community have complained that the bike master plan was supposed to focus on dedicated bike lanes. But of the 90 miles you mentioned, only around 13 miles are bike lanes, and the rest are sharrows. What happened?

Crunican: We did some bike lanes where we could and sharrows where we couldn’t, and bike ridership has gone up 15 percent. We built it, they came, and now the question is, can we do even more?

What we tried to do, particularly in the beginning of the plan, was focus on moving forward with bike lanes where we could put them as quickly as possible. We didn’t know, going into the [Bridging the Gap] election, exactly what we wanted. Then we just moved forward. In some places, there wasn’t the room for a sharrow.

The goal is not to have sharrows all over the place. The goal is to have bike lanes all over the place. You will see more and more bike lanes over time. The bike community wants more right now, but wev’e added everything we can and we want to do more.

PubliCola: McGinn has said he wants to cut 200 positions from the departments, which would obviously have a huge impact on SDOT. Do you think that's a sound policy, given that SDOT is trying to expand things like bike programs?

Crunican: I don’t worry about that kind of stuff. The staff is a really outstanding staff. You’ve got a fine, quality group of people here and a community in Seattle that is asking for more. No one can underestimate  the lack of funding.

If [McGinn] cuts [staff] uniformly throughout the city, that will be fair. We’ll met with them on Friday and we'll take our fair share. I don’t second guess those guys. They've got to come up with what they need to cut.

PubliCola: How much of the changes you're talking about were due to your initiative, and how much was Mayor Nickels pushing his own agenda?

Crunican: The mayor deserves credit for putting his neck on the line with Bridging the Gap and getting funding for light rail [in 2008]. No other politicians were willing to stick their necks out there to put light rail on the ballot.

We've changed the policies in the department. There’s a lot you can do within an organization once you get [staff's] hearts and minds in it. We institutionalized certain policies and programs, and the council and mayor were very supportive of that progressive agenda.

PubliCola: If things had been different, and Mayor Nickels would have won, what would your priorities have been for his third term?

Crunican: I don’t know that the mayor would have asked me to stay on and I would have probably asked for some kind of sabbatical at least. It has been eight years of high productivity, and we have a lot to show for ourselves. This is a rough job and it’s been eight years of high activity. Light rail, monorail, the streetcar—we thought up, designed, funded and built the streetcar in four years.  Mercer wasn’t an easy political thing, and we’re still not done with Mercer yet. We had an 8-1 vote [on the city council] many times during evening meetings, with Mr. [Nick] Licata on the other side. The fifth and seventh round of the viaduct [debate]—each year, there's been another round of opportunity there.

PubliCola: What do you hope to see accomplished in transportation in Seattle in the next four years?

Crunican: We teed up a number of items for whatever mayor comes in. We’’ll have an aggressive bike agenda and we'll have a really aggressive sidewalk agenda. There are a number of cool projects [in the pipeline]. We’re building the streetcar to Capitol Hill.

On the agenda in the next four years will be the question of, How can the community do the waterfront and the seawall and how will we define the [waterfront] promenade and King Street Station? Bridging the Gap will last another 6 years. We’ll have bike lanes all over the place. I think were going to hit some really good numbers.

PubliCola: What are your biggest regrets? The snowstorm obviously comes to mind.

Crunican: My folks were out there trying to battle the snow the whole time. I was in charge of it. I understand we didn’t meet the public’s expectations. But the [news] coverage never mentioned what was going on in Renton, Tacoma, and Everett. The exact same thing was happening there.

For the men and women that did do that work, I’m sorry that the downside of the story was the only thing that was portrayed at the time. Everybody wants a plow on their street, but nobody wants to pay the taxes it would cost to put a plow on every street.

I think we’ve moved on from there. Seattle wasn’t ready to have 14 days of subfreezing temperatures. Ordinarily, we have three days of freezing temperatures and then the rain comes. This time the rain didn’t come for 14 days and some people couldn’t get out.

We did our best, and I don’t think we met the public’s expectations.

PubliCola: What do you think of your incoming replacement, Peter Hahn?

Crunican: I don't know him. He seems like an affable guy.

PubliCola: Who did you vote for in the general election?

Crunican: I voted for McGinn. I had worked with him on several committees, and on the Pedestrian Master Plan.  I voted as a citizen. I thought he understood the problems of the city better than the other fellow [Joe Mallahan].