The vision is simple: design Seattle streets for people.
But Seattle Department of Transportation’s Vision Zero—eliminating traffic deaths by 2030—seems increasingly out of reach
Vision Zero was announced in 2015. In the seven interceding years since the announcement, Seattle’s traffic violence continues to make news with 175 people deaths and 1,200 people serious injuries. This is part of a national public safety crisis: car crashes are the leading cause of death for people ages 1-54 in the United States.
How this happens is no great mystery. We know that since 2015, 93% of pedestrian deaths have occurred on an arterial road. We also know that cyclists and pedestrians are disproportionately victimized by traffic violence: between 2017 and 2022, people outside of a car were involved in just 7% of all crashes but made up 61% of deaths. We know where these deaths are coming from and which Seattleites are most at risk.
Enter the Aurora Reimagined Coalition: a grassroots, neighbor-led organization who wants to take on Seattle’s deadliest street.
According to SDOT, 17% of ALL TRAFFIC DEATHS CITYWIDE occurred on Aurora, which is both a horrifying number and an unignorable target of what needs to be fixed.
The city is ready to invest in some serious changes, and the Aurora Reimagined Coalition (ARC) knows that community engagement is key. Tom Lang, the co-founder of the organization, brought Soapbox Project on to host and moderate a March 2024 workshop to facilitate conversations with neighbors, lead a Q&A with key knowledge-holders, and conduct meaningful action.
Soapbox Project CEO Nivi Achanta (hi, it’s me, and I'll refer to myself in first person from now on) took the E Line to Pilgrim Coffee, where the event was being held. The E Line is Seattle Metro’s highest ridership route, with 3.7 million passengers in 2023 and an average weekday ridership of 12,000 (data from Sept 2023-Jan 2024). The average weekday daily car traffic is ~59,000 for the same area.
SDOT doesn’t seem to release demographic data for individual bus routes, so I’ll share some anecdotal observations from my 5:30PM ride:
I planned to meet up with my neighbor, now friend, and nurse Colleen Kaminski, who learned about ARC through Soapbox Project. She took a 30-minute bike ride to the coffee shop on side streets parallel to Aurora. She shared some observations about her ride to Pilgrim Coffeehouse, our venue, which is located in a big parking lot AKA a shopping center. She told me:
I couldn't take Aurora because of safety issues. I had to take parallel side streets. Phinney (a side street) does have a really nice bike path, but halfway through, there was construction. I had to immediately merge with cars. The "interurban trail" I was encouraged to take is being used as an excuse to vote against a bike lane on Aurora, but in my experience, it was deeply disconnected and confusing to navigate.
Colleen and I wanted to bike + bus because community engagement—especially around such a critical equity issue like transit—doesn’t work if you don’t deeply understand the needs of the community! When the two of us met up at the ARC workshop, we were dismayed (but not surprised) to see that the majority of participants drove to get to the event.
Soapbox Project works quickly and thoughtfully thanks to years of community-building experience and professional consulting expertise. We have numerous frameworks and activities that can be adapted to almost any community setting. Because of this, we were able to lead the ARC’s two-hour event with only one business day’s notice. ✅
Before the event, we sent over a list of nine context-relevant icebreaker questions, a full list of bonus activities, and a suggested flow for the workshop, including objectives, prompts, and advocacy actions.
At Soapbox Project, we LOVE neighbor-led organizations and grassroots-centered advocacy. However, some of these gatherings can be… a bit lacking in structure and goals. These organizations are generally 100% dependent on volunteer time and energy, so our approach is to center joy as a key organizing principle and focus first on getting to know each other as humans.
You’re much less likely to flake on your friends than you are on a tentative volunteer commitment, so we always open all our gatherings with meaningful connection.
After about 20 minutes of casual conversation that followed tabletop prompts, we opened the session by asking why is it important for you to be here today? Everyone had the chance to chat in groups of 2-3 to context-set amongst themselves.
We picked two participants to share with the larger group and heard…
It was a fantastic shared context for the next half hour of learning from neighborhood activists and experts.
Over the one business day of preparing for and executing on the ARC social event, Soapbox Project (specifically, Colleen and me) identified a few key gaps. Again, we LOVE neighborhood organizations, but running strictly on volunteer time is a huge challenge. Some of the things we found were:
At Soapbox Project, we have a bias towards action. While, inside the coffee shop, most people were discussing the idea of community engagement, Colleen went out and did it! It was an invaluable decision in uncovering some key gaps.
I left flyers for SDOT's survey at the laundromat next door and talked to the business owner. Most people in the laundromat were non-English speakers, so someone helped me translate the mission of Aurora Reimagined to the 10ish people who were there. After that, I went to IHOP and spoke with people who worked and dined there. In both locations, people hadn't heard anything about SDOT redoing Aurora and knew nothing about the survey.
We noticed on the bus ride home that there were no flyers on the E Line (whaat?!). It seemed like a pretty big miss to omit the population who, I don't know, actually rides the bus on Aurora, from the survey outreach. When we think about inclusion at Soapbox Project, we look at it structurally; in this case, it was making sure we include the humans who actually use the different (and non-car) modes of transportation every day. ARC's co-founder Tom, at the time of writing, is following up with the city to implement this recommendation.
Community-led advocacy is HARD. It's usually grassroots and volunteer-run. Unfortunately, that means that many organizers think about the experience of a gathering as a nice-to-have. The facilitation is usually an afterthought, as it was for this event too (we were brought in with one business day's notice). Budgets are tight, time is tight... you get it.
But facilitation done right makes A HUGE DIFFERENCE. In fact, we think it's a non-negotiable. Tom, ARC's cofounder who brought Soapbox Project on to help with the event, said it better than we could:
You and Colleen brought the human aspect to the meeting. A warm welcome, a grounding and introduction. that brings everyone up to speed - regardless of their prior knowledge or experience - is invaluable. If you hadn't been there it would have been a much more business-focused event with less laughter and less genuine engagement.
A one-day event isn't enough to transform an entire city, but it sure is a way to get started. These are usually entry points for people who want to get more involved. Without good facilitation and community building principles, newcomers often get lost or discouraged. This is because they can't see their growth journey, or how their presence connects to the overall vision.
This is why, in every event we host, we ask three key questions as we plan the structure:
At this ARC meeting, our shared purpose activation was as simple as asking participants to discuss why is it important for you to be here? At most events, people don't even get this opportunity to chitchat with neighbors about why it's so meaningful to engage!
If we had more lead time, we'd have worked with the ARC team to better understand the layers of engagement. As Colleen and I understood it, the ladder of citizen participation / empowerment / community engagement looks something like this:
Obviously there are a bunch of rungs missing from our ladder, but understanding the layers of engagement, even on a basic level, is key to unlocking momentum on the shared purpose.
Clarity of next steps is SO IMPORTANT. Before we engaged with ARC, there wasn't a clear understanding (for us at least) about what was actually happening at the event. The question why does it matter if I'm here or not, as a participant? was fuzzy. Tom was on board with our recommendation of asking everyone to take SDOT's survey, and YAY, that's 20 or so people who have taken another step up the ladder! ✨
Finally, a note on success metrics: these can be as vibes-focused or numbers-focused as makes sense to you and your event. For this ARC gathering, our "one thing" was: everyone we talk to understands what they can do next. (In this case, it was the survey, so wahoo, success!) Some of our events are measured by did we make at least one person smile or did a child throw a tantrum because they were having so much fun they didn't want to leave? (True story)
When Soapbox Project's facilitation officially ended, Colleen and I got to go around and get to know our neighbors better. Everyone we talked to was grateful to have known about the survey, and that it is possible to meaningfully engage with local government. It wasn't a friction-free evening: people certainly disagreed about taking away car lanes, the impact on small businesses, and all the usual stuff. But most of us left for the night with a sense of hope that together, we can transform Seattle's deadliest street into a connective, vibrant corridor that puts people first.
Get our free bite-sized climate action plans before you go!