Inside the Nation’s First Transportation Equity Program

Interview with Naomi Doerner

In 2017, the Seattle Department of Transportation launched a first-of-its-kind program to make its transportation network, and the process by which that network is planned, increasingly equitable. Naomi Doerner serves as Transportation Equity Program Manager at the Seattle Department of Transportation, and sat for an interview with TransAlt Editor in Chief Jessie Singer to explain what it takes to build a new, fairer framework for transportation planning.

To start, can you explain what transportation equity means?

When we launched the Transportation Equity Program at the Seattle Department of Transportation, we defined it with a picture goal: to provide safe, environmentally sustainable, accessible, and affordable transportation options to support communities of color, low-income communities, immigrant and refugee communities, people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity, LGBTQ people, women and girls, youth, and seniors. Transportation equity should allow all people to travel in and out of, and thrive in, vibrant and healthy communities, and eliminate, or at least mitigate, racial disparities and the effects of displacement.

What does equity have to do with Vision Zero?

First off, Seattle’s Vision Zero program is grounded in the belief that the most effective way to reach zero is through redesigning our streets, to prioritize safety over speed or throughput. To state it plainly, the goal is to enhance safety by changing street design, not relying on enforcement to change behavior. The Seattle Department of Transportation uses data to drive our investments in street design, which means we focus on the corridors with the most serious and fatal injury crashes. Like many other cities, Seattle’s most crash-prone streets intersect with our most diverse communities. Linking back to the data, we can justify our approach and prioritize our work based on need, rather than on the number of phone calls we receive from more connected communities.

“Seattle’s Vision Zero program is grounded in the belief that the most effective way to reach zero is through redesigning our streets, to prioritize safety over speed or throughput. To state it plainly, the goal is to enhance safety by changing street design, not relying on enforcement to change behavior.”

We’ve also made it a priority to engage more with communities who don’t often have a voice, or have historically been disenfranchised and not included. Our Transportation Equity Program and Vision Zero staff have teamed up to bring information, services, and resources to people at places like food banks and community festivals. In partnership with community liaisons from Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, we’re able to bring culturally relevant, in-language materials to immigrants, refugees, and other historically underrepresented communities. We’ve also worked closely with those liaisons to engage residents and businesses along Seattle’s Rainier Avenue corridor — our highest-crash street, which also runs through our most diverse neighborhoods — where we’ve made significant and successful design changes and will continue to make changes.

How did the Transportation Equity Program in Seattle begin?

When we launched in 2017, the program was among the first of its kind in the country, but it was built upon a long tradition of racial equity and social justice work in the city. It’s an outgrowth of goals set in 2004, when the City of Seattle established an initiative to end institutional racism within city government. Since then, many departments have invested in and contributed to achieving the city’s equity and social justice goals — there is a racial equity lens within each department, which helps to inform how staff analyzes and does their core work, as well as institutionalizing racial equity in policies, practices, procedures, and programs.

Seattle DOT’s core values are to create a safe, connected, vibrant, affordable and innovative city for all; the transportation equity program expands on those core values by committing to provide safe, environmentally sustainable, accessible, and affordable transportation options to Seattle’s most vulnerable and disproportionately cost-burdened individuals and households. Investing in transit service and creating access to that service, especially for people with low incomes who are experiencing disproportionate cost burdens, is a key transportation equity strategy.

Support for our program comes from a 2014 voter-approved measure, the Seattle Transportation Benefits District, which increased the vehicle license registration fee by $60 and the sales tax by 0.1 percent to improve transit availability and access, annual free-floating car share permit fees, and a limited City Council-approved allocation of budget. In January 2018, the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted Resolution 31773, which codified the overarching goals of the transportation equity program.

This is all pretty new. What have you done so far?

We’re just getting started, but we started off running. We’ve launched inclusive programming to enroll income-eligible Seattle residents for pre-paid transit cards, in partnership with Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, King County Metro and Public Health Seattle-King County. We also have a special program in which high school students at Seattle Public Schools receive transit passes. All totaled, we’ve distributed over 12,000 transit cards. Most excitingly, perhaps, the ambassador program at the Seattle Department of Transportation has begun to engage community-based organizations and service providers that work with vulnerable, disproportionately cost-burdened individuals and families. We provide funding for staff capacity-building and training, specifically education about all the low-cost ways people can get around and how people can save money doing so, paired with opportunities to enroll in reduced-fare programs. We’re helping these organizations develop ways to embed information about low-cost mobility options and resources into their day-to-day programming. That programming is interpreted and translated into various languages at events throughout the city, often with the support of local community leaders who we pay to provide on-site interpretation and also to support translation for programming materials.

One organization took a brochure we provided them and created a transportation options Bingo card. They gamified the information and made it relevant in their context, making it fun and also informative. They play the game in various languages, including Spanish and Vietnamese. All it takes is for someone explaining what the option is, and then the people playing find the mode or option on their card. After finding five in a row, BINGO! To me, that is both creative and impactful. It’s something we wouldn’t have created, but with a little funding, they developed a useful educational tool for their community that they’ll use again and again. This is important because so much of what we hear is that in addition to access to transportation, there’s also just a need for more information delivered in the appropriate language and in a context-sensitive way.

An advantage of the City of Seattle’s dedication to equity is that our staff serve as subject matter experts, providing strategic advisement on various projects within Seattle DOT and citywide. We’re about to embark upon a year-long engagement process with community members to better understand barriers to, and priorities for, transportation equity. At the end of the day, though, when we’re at an event and someone walks away with information and gets enrolled into a reduced-fare program with value on their card that they can begin to use immediately, that is the ultimate success.

Any revelations in your first year?

We have found that there are a lot of people with various needs and desires. While we’re starting with an affordability focus, given the needs we have identified to date, we believe there are still a lot of other barriers that remain to be addressed.

As transportation investments expand here in Seattle, and policy decisions are made that yield various transportation outcomes, it is critical to have a shared understanding of what our City’s broader transportation equity vision and goals are — working in collaboration with stakeholders and communities, particularly populations that have historically not benefited from transportation and city planning processes, or are currently experiencing inequitable barriers to transportation. This is central to achieving and advancing equity and economic goals. Prioritizing the benefits of our investments around the needs of those who have historically not benefited, and who continue to experience the greatest barriers, requires us to hear and learn from those communities. This is how we create equitable solutions and projects with public resources. Engagement processes help us understand people’s needs and priorities, and help the Seattle DOT create a transportation equity framework for decision making in all projects, programs, plans, and policies.

How can other cities replicate your work?

It’s hard to say “do exactly what we’re doing,” because contexts are different from place to place. However, the most important thing is to start where there is an opportunity to start. Our start was to address an acute issue: affordability. But there are many entry points. We’ve leveraged the program resources we have to create our existing programming, including funding partners and resources for community members. As a result, we’ve been able to increase affordable access to the service we’re investing in. Other cities should find out where their resources are, and carve some time out just to listen, and create community-vetted solutions — and find ways to pay people for their time and input. It’s okay to try things. Listen to community and pilot ideas! That’s the biggest thing.

[This article first appeared in Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities Journal in 2018.]

Naomi Doerner is the Transportation Equity Program Manager at the Seattle Department of Transportation. She has 12 years of professional experience leading inclusive advocacy, planning, and project teams and efforts. Doerner holds a Master of Urban Planning from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a BA in International Affairs, and a Certificate of GIS from Kennesaw State University, GA. She serves on the advisory boards of Playbuild and the Vision Zero Network, and is a co-founder and co-organizer of The Untokening, a multiracial collective that centers the lived experiences of marginalized communities to address mobility justice and equity. Allision Schwartz and Jim Curtin from Seattle DOT contributed to this interview. Jessie Singer is Editor in Chief of TransAlt’s Vision Zero Cities Journal.