Week in Review: May 22, 2026 - with Robert Cruickshank

Hannah Sabio-Howell Challenges Senate Majority Leader Pedersen in Seattle's Most Progressive District from Hacks & Wonks

A politician admits a mistake? Never happens, but it did in Seattle by Danny Westneat from The Seattle Times

Seattle’s Socialist Mayor Taunts the Rich as Rift With Starbucks Widens from The New York Times

The Gaffe Faff: Wilson isn't Misspeaking. She's Delivering. by Josh Feit from PubliCola

Meta lays off 8,000 employees, as AI casualties mount by Alex Halverson from The Seattle Times

Starbucks lays off hundreds connected to Seattle HQ by Dyer Oxley from KUOW

Washington State's budget has been shrinking, not growing, despite statements to the contrary by former elected officials by Andrew Villeneuve from The Cascadia Advocate

City of Seattle poised to declare a civil emergency for LGBTQIA+ refugees fleeing red states by Madison Jones from SGN

Sound Transit Insists It Has No Idea When Light Rail Will Reach Ballard by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist

Amid light rail money crunch, what now for West Seattle, Ballard, Everett? by Mike Lindblom from The Seattle Times

@typewriteralley.bsky.social on Bluesky: “The folks who successfully kept Lake Washington Boulevard more dangerous during the Harrell Administration are calling Katie Wilson's visit to Bicycle Weekends this Saturday a "gloating celebration", spreading lies about access to the shoreline & suggesting people harass city staff on Friday night.”

Katie Wilson Scales Bicycle Weekends on Lake Washington Boulevard Back Up by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist

More Bicycle Weekends? Sure, but spread them around Seattle by The Seattle Times Editorial Board

Find stories that Crystal is reading here

Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here

[00:00:50] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm your host, Crystal Fincher. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it.

If you missed our Tuesday topical show, I spoke with Hannah Sabio-Howell, a labor organizer and former Washington State Senate communications staffer, who's challenging incumbent Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen for the 43rd Legislative District State Senate seat.

Today, we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows, where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: longtime communications and political strategist Robert Cruickshank.

[00:01:52] Robert Cruickshank: Thanks for having me back again, Crystal.

[00:01:54] Crystal Fincher: Thanks for being back. Well, we've got a number of things to discuss today - starting off with, my goodness, Mayor Wilson is making a lot of news. And The Seattle Times, so many people - especially in the business community - seem to not be able to stop talking about her, what she is doing, full of opinions. What are we seeing and what is happening?

[00:02:18] Robert Cruickshank: Well, it's pretty wild because Katie Wilson hasn't actually rolled out a City budget yet, she hasn't rolled out any tax policy, she hasn't rolled out any changes to business regulations. She's been spending the first few months of her term in office really focused on homelessness and getting shelters stood up quickly, which I think everyone in the city - no matter where you land politically - thinks is a great idea. Like we need to build shelter, get these people in off the street. And yet, despite her not having actually proposed any tax increases or regulatory changes, there is this public crashing out going on among the business community, absolutely terrified - or at least they are in public - of what Katie Wilson, this socialist mayor, is going to do.

And it's really coming to a head around Starbucks. And not just the stores where you go and get your coffee, but Starbucks obviously has its corporate headquarters here in SoDo in the old Sears building - there just south of T-Mobile Field. And their CEO, based in California, has been going on a whole cost-cutting spree - closing a whole bunch of stores, including those that have been attempting to unionize, and creating a new corporate office in Nashville. And Starbucks, when you read their press releases closely, they don't say they're moving the headquarters out of Seattle, they don't say that this is targeting Seattle. But the public discourse that the business community has is very much that - blaming Katie Wilson, whether it's her tax policies that she hasn't unveiled, her regulatory policies that she hasn't unveiled. Or most notably the moment right after she got elected last fall, where she showed up at a worker-led protest in front of one of those Starbucks stores that was attempting to unionize and she called for a boycott, or joined the call for a boycott. And well, the business community really thought that was awful and terrible of Katie Wilson. Danny Westneat called it a gaffe. And she didn't actually do anything. The argument is that by doing this, by shaming the company and calling for a boycott - she chased them out of Seattle to Nashville is the way the narrative goes, which is completely misreading what is happening. Starbucks looks at trying to cut costs. They look at the fact they have to pay high salaries to corporate employees in Seattle because we have a high cost of living - not because of taxes, not because of regulations, but because we haven't built enough housing, our salaries are higher than they are in Tennessee. So they're going to try to move people to Tennessee and pay them less. That's all that's going on here. And yet, the business community, the Chamber of Commerce, The Seattle Times, and all their allies see an opportunity to use that to try to preemptively attack Katie Wilson and progressive tax policy. That's the real story here.

[00:05:01] Crystal Fincher: It really does seem perplexing to so many people. And I think people are most surprised because they're like - didn't the city just elect Katie Wilson because she had these views? These were things that were talked about, debated during the election. She hasn't said anything - when it comes to economic and budget issues, her stance on business - that is in any way contradictory to how she conducted herself during the campaign. She ran against a notoriously pro-business incumbent that she unseated in order to win election. Yet there are people in this city - in the business community - seemingly shocked that she wouldn't be deferential to the business community. She made a New York Times headline saying that she was taunting the rich. Why does this seem to both surprise and bother the business community, while it's something that she talked about and the city's voters seemingly supported?

[00:06:09] Robert Cruickshank: I think there's a really interesting shift going on in the larger business community that we should all be aware of. Part of it is these billionaires who are in all these group chats with each other - Howard Schultz, who used to be Starbucks CEO, Jeff Bezos, obviously, who used to run Amazon, they both moved from Seattle to Miami. They're all in the same conversations with these billionaires, and they're all sort of psyching each other up and getting each other angsty about progressive tax policy. And they are really worried - and they should be - that the public is demanding higher taxes on the rich. Jeff Bezos did an interview this week in which he says - Well, you know, raising taxes on me isn't going to help that teacher. I don't know - I'd like to try before we decide it doesn't work. So they're upset about that - they're looking for ways to head that off.

There is also economic shifts happening, right? Trump is crashing our economy around us. And as costs rise, companies are laying off more and more workers. The Seattle boom of the 2010s is ending. We're not in a bust. We're not in a recession yet. Our unemployment rate is still five something percent, which is pretty low by historic standards. But Meta just laid off another couple thousand people this week. Amazon has been laying tens of thousands of people off for the last couple years. Starbucks is laying people off. And what that does is it creates an angst out there in the public. And I'm sure people listening, I'm sure you, Crystal, I know people who've either been laid off or really struggling to find a job. They'd like to make more money to help keep their head above water as Trumpism raises the price of everything around us. It's becoming harder. It's not the 2010s anymore where Amazon had just reams of open jobs and you could pick one.

And so what's happening is these business lobbyists and their mouthpieces at The Seattle Times and elsewhere are picking up on that angst and trying to direct that angst against progressive tax and regulatory policy. And we need to be really aware that that's what's happening because that's what they did to us on homelessness and on public safety earlier this decade - and we lost two City elections over it. I think that there is a very clear deliberate effort to make that happen around the Millionaire's Tax, around JumpStart, around a possible Seattle capital gains tax. So we progressives - yeah, we should debunk all these nonsense they're saying. But also, we're ultimately going to have to develop economic policies, job creation policies that are progressive that can help us survive Trump.

[00:08:33] Crystal Fincher: Well, I think you bring up a really good point. This absolutely relates to the statewide conversations that we're having about budgets, about taxation. Washington is notoriously the 49th most regressive tax state in the country, meaning that people at the bottom and the middle of the economic ladder are paying more as a percentage of their income in taxes and public fees than the people at the very top. We're seeing a lot of these arguments come to the forefront with the debate around the Millionaire's Tax, seeing stories and headlines about this is going to drive high-income people out of the state - which those of us who have some age on us remember these same arguments being talked about with the capital gains tax, with every minimum wage increase that we have here. This is always an argument that's talked about, and we haven't seen it come to fruition yet. But there was an article this week that came out even talking about how the state budget is being talked about and framed. And as we're talking about attacks, hearing some of the arguments that we used to hear in like the early 2000s about - We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. The budget's too big, we need to cut waste, fraud and abuse. How do you parse all that? And is that an accurate statement?

[00:10:01] Robert Cruickshank: Well, one of those business mouthpieces who's making that argument is former Democratic Governor of Washington State, Christine Gregoire, who was at a roundtable public event earlier this week and said - Yeah, well, you know, when I left office in the early 2010s, the state budget was around $30 billion a year. Now it's going to $80 billion - isn't that terrible? Spending's out of control. Well, she leaves some important things out. When she left office, we hadn't fully implemented Obamacare, which included a massive expansion of Medicaid - that's great. That adds several billion dollars to the annual budget. We hadn't done the McCleary decision, which was handed down when she was governor, in response to her budget cuts to public education - that required billions more for schools and in state spending. And the budget has grown also from COVID-era stimulus, a lot of which has continued. So ultimately, we are doing things which are good. We are providing more people with health care, more people with education, more people with services - many of which she had slashed to the bone during her time in office.

And that hasn't hurt our economy. In fact, we need to reorient this conversation back to what grows jobs. The number one thing that grows jobs is public spending. We can't keep chasing after these companies, right? We need to look at other states where they got too dependent on a single industry - like Pennsylvania and steel, or Michigan and the auto industry. Rather than diversify when those industries went into trouble, they bent over backwards to give those industries whatever they wanted, no matter the cost. And they became chained to these companies. And when those industries failed, the state failed. Whereas in Washington state, when we had a Boeing bust in the 1970s, we didn't lash ourselves to Boeing - we went out and built a high-tech sector. Boeing still employs tons of people here. Amazon's going to continue to employ a ton of people here, as is Microsoft, as is Meta, as is Starbucks. But what comes next? What is the next source of job creation? That's what progressives can provide. And taxing these businesses and these wealthy people will help provide that, especially if we're spending it on housing and bringing the cost of living down, on education, on higher education, on research to backfill all the cuts that are happening at the federal level. And this is not what the businesses want because they have this dream that they can just keep paying low taxes and the public will go along with it. And the public is done with it - they are losing the argument. So trying to shift the ground and take advantage of that angst around all the layoffs that are piling up. But I think if progressives are smart, we can speak to that angst directly and say - Yeah, we have an answer. We're going to spend money on good research, on new industries and build lasting jobs that aren't dependent on the whims of Howard Schultz or Jeff Bezos.

[00:12:43] Crystal Fincher: Well, and it's so interesting, even just thinking about this issue in terms of a partisan lean. Because as we saw just a couple of years ago with a statewide referendum on essentially progressive taxation, that the issue and idea of taxing the rich is not one that is solely popular with people at the left side of the spectrum. That people at the left, middle, and the right were all in support to, you know, two-thirds of the state saying, essentially - Yeah, tax the rich, that's the way forward. What do our elected officials do with that in the face of this seeming business lobbying and media strategy that we're seeing play out on the front pages of these papers?

[00:13:29] Robert Cruickshank: Well, I mean, these elected officials need to understand this is a different state than it was 20 years ago. When Christine Gregoire won her first election as Governor in 2004, she won it by 100 votes. And when she left office in 2012 and Jay Inslee succeeded her as Governor, he won by a very close margin over his Republican opponent. But that was 15, 20 years ago. Things have changed dramatically - we're a reliably blue state, progressives continue to win Democratic Party primary fights, they beat Republican challengers. And as you pointed out, the actual policies themselves are even more popular. The capital gains tax was upheld in large parts of eastern, central Washington, rural Washington, as well as us crazy lefties in Puget Sound. And I think it's important for elected officials in Olympia to keep that in mind - that all this noise that is being generated by businesses and wealthy people who don't want to pay more taxes is noise. And that noise has an impact, right? You have to get in the trenches and have that argument and respond to what's being said and fight back. But the public is still with them. The public still wants to tax these people because we know that's where the money is. They're the ones who benefited the most out of the last 15 years of economic activity. And that we need, especially as Trump is gutting the safety net and driving our cost of living through the roof - we need those public services more than ever. And these billionaires and big corporations can afford to fund it.

[00:14:53] Crystal Fincher: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this. There's going to be a robust public conversation - certainly about the Millionaire's Tax, taxation proposals at the city levels - but there is going to have to be some revenue solutions that are brought to the table and passed here. So people are going to have to figure it out, hash it out. We'll continue to follow it.

I do want to talk about the City of Seattle this week declaring a state of emergency to support LGBTQ refugees. What did the City do?

[00:15:24] Robert Cruickshank: Well, the Seattle Human Rights Commission and the Seattle LGBTQ Commission have urged the City to declare a state of emergency because of so many people who are moving to Seattle from these red states where not only are states like Tennessee and Louisiana and Alabama reimposing Jim Crow, they've also been imposing awful policies targeting the LGBTQ community and people are looking for a place of refuge. And these commissions have urged the City to come forth with a declaration of emergency to make it easier to coordinate City agencies to provide housing and services to people who need it. And I think this is a really worthwhile thing to do for two reasons. The first is the obvious one, which is we need to help folks who are looking to come here to escape oppression in other parts of this country. People see Seattle as a safe haven. And we know it's not always that, right? The awful murder of Juniper Blessing at UW is a reminder that it is not always safe to live here as an LGBTQ person. It's a lot safer, perhaps, but one murder is one well too many. So we need to step up and protect everyone who's here.

We also need to welcome folks. And part of that is also about jobs. So I posted about this on Instagram - this story about the state of emergency and how Seattle should be a place of refuge - and I got tons of comments from people around the country who said that they were trans, they were gay, they were queer, they were bi, they were lesbian, living in places like Nashville, Atlanta, Houston. They said - I would love to move to Seattle right now. But it wasn't the cost of living that was getting in the way. It's that one person said - I work in IT. There are no IT jobs in Seattle right now. And that really struck me. If we want to be a welcoming place for people, we have to protect their basic safety, absolutely. We also need to be able to provide affordable housing and jobs. And not just to people fleeing another place, but the people who are also here as well - those are not in contest or contrast with each other. And so when I saw that article about the state of emergency, it struck a chord for me. I think it struck a chord for a lot of people that this is kind of our way out. We're trying to figure out what do we do in this moment where these big corporations are doing layoffs and picking fights with our mayor about policy. How do we build an economy? Well, look at how many people with great talent and skill and creativity living around the country desperately want to come here and bring those skills here to Seattle. We should find ways to welcome them, employ them, house them, and keep them safe.

[00:17:59] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. We have to be able to provide for people's basic needs in order to be a place of refuge. We certainly have a lot to offer, but also a ways to go. So appreciate you talking about that, the coverage of that by Seattle Gay News, and will be exciting to see how they continue to move towards making this a really supportive place for everybody here and for LGBTQ refugees from elsewhere.

Do want to talk about this week about some worse news - with Sound Transit and them looking at potentially cutting Sound Transit 3 projects. What are they considering doing?

[00:18:44] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, so this coming Thursday, May 28th, the Sound Transit Board is going to meet and is going to consider and potentially approve a resolution that really scaled back the ST3 project that we all approved 10 years ago at the 2016 ballot. It looks like they're going to scale back the line to Ballard and maybe stop at Seattle Center. It looks like they're not going to build the long-promised station at Graham Street in South Seattle. They're not going to build the Boeing Access Road Station. They are going to delay the line to Issaquah into the 2050s. And it's pretty absurd looking at this. Now, their argument is the inflation and the long delays in planning meant it cost $35 billion more to build the system than they thought. Okay, I get that. But these projects are absolutely essential to our ability to get people around in a growing, densifying city. If you've taken a look at gas prices lately, you can see why it's important to have better transit. If you've taken a look at the forecasts of drought and the lack of snowpack, you can see why we need to have sustainable transportation that means we're not burning fossil fuel.

And so there's been a whole effort at organizing happening around the Puget Sound region, not just in Seattle, to fight against this. And really lobbying those Sound Transit board members who are all elected officials - like Girmay Zahilay and Katie Wilson, Teresa Mosqueda - really asking them to uphold the promises that were made to voters when we passed ST3, find more affordable ways to build that same stuff, build it more quickly. And find the new financial tools. Like Sound Transit did a survey of the public and said - What do you want us to do? Go out and get more money, or cut back projects? And 75% said - Go get more money. Only about 24% said - Yeah, cut all those projects back. And Sound Transit says - Well, we're not really cutting them. We're just going to delay them indefinitely. And when we get more money, we're coming back. But what I say to that is, my wife's an architect. She's drawn up plans for us to have a cabin on an island in the San Juans. We don't have the money to do that. But I don't go around telling people - I have these plans for a cabin on an island. I mean, it's vapor if I don't have the money or the land. And that's what Sound Transit essentially tried to tell us - that they'll build a Graham Street Station or build rail to Ballard. We have that plan, just don't have the money. If you're taking it off the timeline, if you're kicking it out so far to the future, you don't actually have a plan. So rather than adopt this resolution, let's all work together to bring down the cost, find the new financial resources, and get it all built quickly.

[00:21:12] Crystal Fincher: That seems to make the most sense. And delay drives up the overall cost - in fact, that's one of the reasons that they cite for us being in a deficit compared to the money needed for the projects today - is that extended timelines and inflation drove up the cost for construction. So how does delay become both a cause of the problem and the solution?

[00:21:38] Robert Cruickshank: Well, I mean, that's exactly it. If you don't have the money to build it now - if you push it out further - it's only going to cost you a lot more in the future. I mean, we're all struggling with this now in the 2020s - because in the 1960s, we rejected the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives that would have built the entire system for like $2 billion. And the longer you wait, the more inflation bites at you. And so you've got to figure out how to come together and solve this. Now, one of the problems we have - not just in Seattle, but around North America - is our construction costs for infrastructure are far higher. Even than in Europe, where they have the same environmental and labor protection - so it's not that. It's that we spend so much money on consultants, we take so long to plan things, we try to keep everybody happy by building stations in a way that aren't going to make a NIMBY unhappy - that the cost soars. And we need to refocus on delivering this stuff quickly and efficiently, because that's what voters want. You can't go around breaking trust with voters like this. It's going to make it very difficult to pass any future Sound Transit measures if voters feel like - We gave you all this money for all these promises in 2016 and you broke it, why would we do that again? So the hope is that elected officials on the Sound Transit Board would recognize that and find a different way.

[00:22:51] Crystal Fincher: I mean, what you just cite is a legitimate gripe that a lot of people in the suburbs and some of these other areas are having with Sound Transit. And bleeding into support for transit overall, saying - We have been paying taxes for these projects for literally decades now, with the promise that this was coming in a certain timeline and now you're talking about delaying or cutting back and not delivering it - one. And two, we saw scaling back for some of the existing projects that we have and now people are feeling the cost of that. I'm thinking about at-grade lines throughout the Rainier Valley and the challenges brought with safety with pedestrians, with car and vehicle behavior and misbehavior causing delays in the line and overall reliability of the system. And making these kinds of concessions on the front end for something that's an infrastructure investment meant to serve the community for decades to come seems really short-sighted in a way that we're actually feeling today.

[00:24:01] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah. There are dumb ways to save money - building the line to the Rainier Valley at-grade on MLK was a dumb you way to save money. It's cost people lives and undermined safety. There are smart ways to save money, right? There's a former SDOT Director, Scott Kubly, who's out there pushing a proposal to use automated light rail trains to get to Ballard and West Seattle like the SkyTrain uses in Vancouver. And that could work - it deserves further study, but Sound Transit is saying they're not going to study it. They're just going to plow right ahead with cuts to the system. And that doesn't make any sense to me. Why not take the time to actually study proposals like this that can build smarter, more affordably, right? An automated light rail system isn't at-grade where people are going to potentially get hit by a train. It's still a subway. It's still separated and safe. And so what a lot of people around the region are urging Sound Transit to do - not just in Seattle and King County, but in Snohomish and Pierce Counties - is if we don't get these costs under control, we're not going to build the system. And now is a time to really think creatively and cleverly about how we do that. And that is the hope - that Sound Transit's leadership will recognize not just the urgency, but the opportunity to show the rest of the country how you can build great mass transit at a lower price.

[00:25:17] Crystal Fincher: How do people make their voices heard in this issue? If someone has an opinion, what should they do?

[00:25:22] Robert Cruickshank: Sound Transit makes it pretty easy. You can just send an email to emailtheboard - all one word - emailtheboard@soundtransit.org, and it will go to all 18 board members. And just, you know, be polite. Don't get mean with these people. We want their vote. And tell them - Don't scale back ST3. Let's take the time to find the financial tools and cost-saving solutions so we can build everything that voters promise and build it by 2040.

[00:25:46] Crystal Fincher: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this and what they ultimately decide and deliberate over. Now, another issue that has been making headlines in an interesting way is NIMBY drama over Bicycle Weekends on Lake Washington Boulevard. What are Bicycle Weekends and are they the end of the world as we know it?

[00:26:11] Robert Cruickshank: Only if you thought they were in 2020. So if you think back to 2020 and, you know, social distancing and lockdowns, one of the things the City did was - to encourage people to get out of the house, to get exercise, to socialize safely - was they closed a number of streets and made them, you know, Safe Streets for people to walk and bike on. And one of them was Lake Washington Boulevard. And ultimately, people really liked it. It's a beautiful location right there along Lake Washington in South Seattle. It's easy to get to by transit. And closing it really made a lot of sense during the pandemic. And so it was decided - Well, let's keep doing it. Let's have annual or regular weekend closures during the summertime - that seems great.

[00:26:55] Crystal Fincher: So now - I want to ask you a question because listening to some feedback on this, you get the impression that this road is closed permanently and they are banning cars. Is this closed year round?

[00:27:08] Robert Cruickshank: No. No, this is not a year-round permanent closure. This is, you know, weekends in the summertime where people who live in the community or not can all come and enjoy it together. You can get on your bike, you can get on your foot - whatever it is that's not a car - and use this road. And one thing that comes to mind about why this is necessary - I know a number of us were there at Mount Baker Park or at Lake Washington Boulevard on Father's Day a year ago. And we saw a car driving up the road, creating sparks - something was underneath it. And I remember we were at this park watching and we saw it was a children's bicycle. Thank God the child who got hit had jumped off the bike, seen the car coming in time - the child was completely unhurt. But we didn't know that when we saw this happening. It's happened right there on Lake Washington Boulevard - a kid out there on the bike trying to enjoy it. And people who don't like this, who believe that cars should have priority everywhere, argue that - Well, you know, if you're on a bike, you can still use it safely. But I think back to that car dragging the bike underneath it, creating sparks. I'm like, that wasn't safe. And so what Katie Wilson has done is say - Yeah, we're going to go back and actually do the weekend closures during the summertime so people can enjoy it. And man, are the NIMBYs mad.

[00:28:25] Crystal Fincher: They're so mad about this. Now we did see an op-ed come out saying - It's unfair to do this on just Lake Washington Boulevard on weekends. You're preventing people from being able to get home. You're causing unnecessary hardship for these million-dollar homeowners. How are they supposed to do this? This is a mobility hazard. Why can't you close other streets? How do you respond to that? How are others responding to that?

[00:28:56] Robert Cruickshank: Cool. Let's close other streets, in addition. There is an effort to close The Ave in the U District on a regular basis. People talked about Alki. We used to actually do this a lot more frequently in the 2010s and the early 2010s. We'd have Summer Streets, Safe Streets, Play Streets - that got scaled back, especially under Mayor Jenny Durkan. But yeah, let's do more of it. But that's not an alternative to the regular weekend closures of Lake Washington Boulevard for everyone to enjoy safely. That's a model that we should use - on what's Lake Washington Boulevard - for other parts of the city. So people can get out there on foot, on bike, whatever it is and enjoy the city safely. We have some of the best summers in the country. We have some of the most beautiful scenic streets in the country. Let's be able to enjoy them without having to worry about dodging some driver speeding along down the road.

[00:29:47] Crystal Fincher: So this isn't part of a new socialist manifesto that Katie Wilson is forcing upon everyone?

[00:29:55] Robert Cruickshank: No, but you know - to the extent that it is, it's something the public voted for. I mean, this was - Bruce Harrell had made it very clear, as a person who lives in that area, he was siding with those NIMBYs and scaling this all back. And Katie Wilson had made it pretty clear where she stood. So this was an issue that came up in the election and the voters spoke. And elections do have consequences. And I think one of them is that people will be able to use Lake Washington Boulevard safely on summer weekends.

[00:30:23] Crystal Fincher: You know, it seems to make sense to a lot of people in this city that cars are one way of getting around. And so are bikes, and so is walking. And it seems to a lot of people that people walking, riding - should be able to also get around safely - to be able to go out with their families and enjoy the public infrastructure of the city and have that not be reserved exclusively for cars. Especially as I've heard, you know - This is a major north-south arterial as if Wilson and Rainier Avenue and MLK don't exist in the immediate vicinity. But, you know, this is part of everybody being able to participate and benefit from public infrastructure.

[00:31:14] Robert Cruickshank: And some of the strongest supporters of this are parents of kids, people who have kids right now. You talk to so many parents and they love the idea that their kid could go around their neighborhood on foot or on bike, but they're scared because of other drivers. I will never forget when my son, a few years ago, got the bike out of the shed. He kind of tried to learn, but wasn't really interested. But the beginning of summer a couple of years ago, he's like, Dad, I'm going to learn. In 45 minutes he had it nailed. He's like, Dad, can I go right to the park around the corner? Sure, son. And I watched him. And as he rounded the corner, my heart just leapt into my throat. Please don't get hit by a car. Please don't get hit by a car. Please don't get hit by a car. And that's the thing, you know, that we should be able to do in this city - is let your kid go to the park on foot or on bike and not have to worry about them getting hit. And that's what this really comes down to is - we want that to be that type of city. And I think most Seattleites would agree, except for some loud NIMBYs who live near Lake Washington Boulevard.

[00:32:16] Crystal Fincher: Well, certainly if we can take one of several major arterials and let people who aren't in cars get the full enjoyment and safety of that for a handful of weekends throughout the year - seems to make sense to a lot of people. We will continue to follow that.

And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, May 22nd, 2026. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Shannon Cheng. Our insightful co-host today was longtime communications and political strategist Robert Cruickshank. You can find Robert on Bluesky at @robertcruickshank.com. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Bluesky at @HacksAndWonks. And find me on Bluesky at @finchfrii, with two I's at the end. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows - on some weeks, we're on an interesting schedule because life is lifing - and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, please leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources and articles we talked about in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com.

Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.