Spokane’s city government is getting a new member — in a new position — in February.
Jon Snyder is a former Spokane City Council member, representing District 2, and previously served as senior policy advisory for outdoor recreation and economic development to Washington’s last governor Jay Inslee, where he handled bicycle and pedestrian safety.
His new job is a cabinet-level position in Spokane as director of transportation and sustainability.
He sat down with SPR’s Owen Henderson as he prepared to take office.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: As your start date approaches in February, what do you see as some of your main areas of interest once you get underway with your new position?
JON SNYDER: So I think what's great about the city right now is we have plans, we have initiatives, we have funding. There's a lot of things that have been going on in the last five to 10 years where the city has created new initiatives for safety, and the public has expressed their desires through various plans for more active transportation infrastructure, and just more safe streets in general. Because when streets are safe for people who are biking, walking, using a wheelchair, or taking the bus, they're safer for everybody. So I'm looking to just come in and try to magnify those efforts.
OH: Well, speaking of those efforts, are there any initiatives Spokane is already pursuing or has in the works that have piqued your interest specifically?
JS: Yeah, so the one that I think just got announced recently that I think is really compelling is the 27 by 27 effort to create this new bike network, taking some of the key connections and routes suggested by the bicycle priority network and separating them out into a high priority chunk that we can do in a few years, I think is great.
OH: What are the areas where you’re interested in getting something new started or maybe being a sort of catalyst to push things forward a little faster?
JS: I'm very interested in a couple things. Well, a lot of things, but three areas that I think are really important are:
Transit. We have two new high-performance transit lines being worked on right now, one that goes east-west out to the valley and along Sprague, and STA is also working on bus rapid transit on Division. Those are going to be really important to our economy, to our future, to the environment, helping people get places easier to employment and education via transit.
The next one is e-bikes. E-bikes have such incredible potential, especially in a city like Port Vienna where we have a lot of hills, to help people replace car trips with bike trips. Not everybody's going to want to do that, but a lot of people really would like to if we had better infrastructure, if we had better places to bike.
It costs somebody, the average person, about $10,000 a year to maintain and upkeep a car, gas, car payments, insurance.
If you require every adult in a household to have their own car, that's a huge amount of money burden to be putting on households. If somebody can do that with an e-bike or a regular bike instead, it's like you're giving them a raise.
Lastly, in order to get people feeling safe to use bikes, we really need to increase the safety of our streets. That is one thing I'm really interested in working on.
The city is doing some great work. Kudos to folks at the city for getting a $12 million Safe Streets for All federal grant to help with these efforts. The adaptive design efforts are also really great. We put in a lot of good projects.
How can we do more? One of the things that I think comes up is people are always asking to get traffic to slow down, especially in the neighborhoods. That's why we've had such a strong history with speed cameras, red light cameras, because they really are an effective way to change people's behavior with that kind of reckless speed driving.
I worked on a bill last year at the legislature to expand the ability of cities to use speed cameras. I think they can be very effective. It's one of the things we'll definitely look at.
I think a lot of folks think that the way to slow down traffic is to throw up a stop sign. Sometimes, that is the right thing that we need to do.
Other times, it turns sleepy streets into arterials where oncoming traffic knows that there's a stop sign, so they'll drive faster. Sometimes, you want to use a four-way stop. Sometimes, if people's behavior is not going to change that much, a different treatment makes more sense.
The Washington Department of Transportation has a roundabout first philosophy on a lot of things. As a 140-year-old city, Spokane just can't throw in a roundabout everywhere because the space that they take up is sometimes difficult to accommodate, but they sometimes are the right solution. Sometimes, it's other solutions.
I think what's important is that the city addresses the specific need in the specific context of safety situations.
OH: It’s a pretty divisive time, politically, so I want to ask how you approach conversations with people who have strong negative reactions to even just your job title or are skeptical that the city needs someone in this new position?
JS: Yeah, so I would say I've kind of lived most of my life in that divide. Growing up in Spokane, owning a small business in Spokane and then running for office in Spokane. I've knocked on doors in every district of the city for various things, including my own campaign, campaigns of others and other things that I've done.
And I feel like I understand that people have differing thoughts on a lot of these things. But when it comes right down to it, a transportation system that works well and a transportation system that's safe is probably one of those things that we have more agreement on than we realized. And Exhibit A would be the vote on the 27 by 27 plan.
I believe that was a unanimous vote on council. Council has people of much different political backgrounds and they're united on that. And I believe the Safe Streets for All grant was the same way.
So in the midst of a lot of division, I think this is a place where there is some unity and I'm looking forward to trying to find some good opportunities to bring people together on that.