A RESOLUTION requesting that the Seattle Department of Transportation develop a budget proposal for creating on-street bike and e-scooter parking.
The bill passed. And Cheryl, sign it. Please read the item. All right. Please read agenda item number four. Resolution 318 and 88 requesting that the State Department transportation develop a budget proposal for creating on street, bike and e-scooter parking. The committee recommends the resolution be adopted as amended. Councilmember O'Brien. Thank you. I'll just speak briefly to this and give a chance to my colleague, Councilmember Pacheco, to speak to it as he has done a lot of work on this. We heard in public comment today from a lot of folks, and I really appreciate everyone here finding public comment both to the need to have more mobility options for everyone and for the need to ensure that we provide the infrastructure and the enforcement to ensure that people using the various mobility options do it appropriately. This specific piece of legislation is a step in getting the infrastructure built so that there are places for folks to park their bicycle scooters or whatever comes along next in the mobility world. There's continued work to do enforcement, and I really appreciate the comments. Marci, your comments in particular you helped share with me over the over the last week in another jurisdiction where I believe one of the one of the E-Scooter share companies had created penalties for folks that are parking those that are their customers, who are parking the scooters inappropriately. And I think that is an enforcement step that we need to do. We don't have e-scooters, but we do have bikes. And I think we should step up our enforcement and work with the companies that are on our streets to hold their customers accountable and make sure that they have a place to do it. I also appreciate your comments, Marci, about making sure that we're simply not penalizing low income folks and making it so that they no longer can afford to have access to the type of mobility ability options that some communities may be in most need of happening. So it's complex. And the thing that gives me hope is there's an amazing group of advocates that represent a broad swath of our community that are thoughtfully engaged in finding solutions. And we will work through that complexity as a city if we're going to be successful. And having folks engaged is is an amazing thing. And so sorry I spoke too long, but I want to hand it over to Councilman Pacheco to speak specifically to this legislation. Councilman Pacheco. Well, first, I want to thank the community advocates with the mass coalition for doing so much work, as well as advocacy here today as well as prior in my council colleagues, Councilmember O'Brien and Mosquito, who have come with some recommendations and some amendments in committee. So the budget proposal, it's the resolutions is to start to come back to us with a budget proposal to double buy the number of bikeshare and scooter parking spaces by next year, as well as include provisions for financial penalties to enforce proper parking of the bike share and scooters. As we've heard today during public comment, the need for us to have better enforcement of these mobility options and so I'm excited to get to have post have voted this out of committee as well as hopefully be able to get this out of council today so that we can have our assignment before us before we get to the budget later this month. Thank you, Katherine Pacheco. Any more comments on the resolution? Councilmember Mesquita. Thank you very much, Mr. President. I want to take a quick second to thank council members Pacheco and Councilmember O'Brien for taking the first steps on this legislation to really help us get scooters into Seattle in a safe and responsible way. I think we've been able to hear from a number of transit advocates or multi-modal transit transportation advocates that there is a desire to help promote environmentally friendly transit options that create equity and also build healthy communities. And I really want to thank Mary and others who testified today about the need to make sure that as we roll out any program or pilot, that we're doing so in direct conversation with communities that could potentially benefit from the creation of scooters, for example, but also that we're taking into consideration all the unintended consequences. And I think creating corrals and making those available for bikes and for scooters in the future help us to proactively respond to the concerns that we've seen in other cities. We can do that in a way that learns from other cities and how they've been able to move those scooters off the sidewalk and out of the ramps that allow for people to have easy and safe access to our protected sidewalks. And I think that's a critically important for us to create these corrals now so that when we potentially roll out policy in the future, we have a place for these bikes and scooters to go in the future. The other two things that I think are really exciting about us having this conversation, as one Glen mentioned, which dovetails with, you know, we want there to be more access to bikes and scooters in the future, not to necessarily penalize people for not putting them in the right place by having us not have as much access to those scooters. But we have or sorry to those bikes, but we have to have a place to put those bikes. So creating the the corrals is incredibly important. And then the last thing I'll mention that I'm looking forward to is I think as we create more sound policies like this, it behooves us to take a look at what other cities have done, especially around labor protections. What we saw in the city of Chicago, for example, is that they do not use independent contractors there. They require the companies to have actual workers and employees. So that can help us create more accountability and responsibility in terms of how these companies are both interacting with the built environment and with the higher labor standards that we'd like to see in our city. So I'm excited about these higher standards that we're putting into place now. I think that it sets us up well to implement best practices from across the country. And I think overall really excited about making sure that we don't just have a point in time check in with key stakeholders, including from disability rights community, but also that we've built into future legislation how we're going to have the stakeholder engagement all along the process to make sure that these corrals and future legislation on transit options really do meet everybody's needs. So thank you so much for taking this up. And let's get scooting. I had to say something like that. Thank you very much, Skinner. Any further questions before we vote on the resolution? We're good. Okay. Those in favor of adopting the resolution. Please vote i i those opposed vote no. The motion carries the resolution. Adopt and show. Sign it. Please read the next agenda item.