I always called him by his full name because it made him laugh. Shawn Yim and I crossed paths in the lunchroom, on the road, at our lockers, the bullpen, the layovers, and everywhere else. We moved in similar circles.

He and I both had the seniority to pick away from Atlantic Base, home of the hardest and most challenging routes; and we both had the seniority to pick away from night work, but for different reasons we wanted to be there, working our night shifts together downtown. I do it because I like the people and the pace; Shawn did it because he needed the money, and overtime is best found on the routes, times, and places that are least desirable.

But the 70 is such a cush route.

It doesn’t even go to 12th and Jackson. It’s too short for sleepers. It’s just the 70. Shawn wasn’t downtown, either. This happened in the U District. And, reading this at home, you might think 3am is a uniquely dangerous time, but it isn’t. In post-Covid Seattle there’s no difference in safety between 3pm and 3am. Both are equally fraught. Remember the new full-time bus driver who, perhaps because he was African, was recently attacked by three men who pulled him off his bus at Third and James and stripped him naked and beat him to a pulp? That happened during afternoon rush hour, broad daylight with tons of people around. 

Our city allows this sort of thing. 

Let the terrible sentence live now as it did then, in that poor operator’s horrific experience. He will never forget those minutes. The same is true for the ten people recently stabbed near 12th and Jackson within a 36-hour period, by one deranged individual who attacked all of his victims unprovoked and mostly from behind. There are good folks up there at that notorious intersection, from the small business owners to the seniors in affordable housing to yes, the youngsters outside struggling with drugs. I happen to really like some of those people. They don’t deserve to be stabbed.

Neither did Shawn. I consider his final moments with the paralysis of intimate sorrow, intimate because I’ve probably driven the very same vehicle was sitting in, and because I know exactly the terrain and timbre of his final time and place. Shawn Yim as he stumbled away from the bus, making it only a short distance before collapsing on the concrete, over there in the alley behind Wells Fargo, a young and healthy 59 year-old dying alone, collapsing not just in loss of blood but also in belief. How could it possibly end this way, so badly and so soon? All the things I’d planned for, hoped for, wanted to do, fix, see, live….

You remember that I was in Paris during the 2015 terror attacks. My next book dives deep into that. But you also remember how decisively Paris, as a system of governance, took action in responding to something even as nebulous as terrorists, taking preventative measures while pursuing the appropriate action behind the scenes, swiftly and with the use of considerable resources. They ensured safety when the enemy was unknown and few. 

Our situation is different. Seattle’s problems and dangers are not hidden but obvious. They repeat in predictable and terrifying ways. Violent behavior happens here without intervention. Life-destroying drugs can be used in broad daylight without consequence. Unstable souls with desperate needs, dangers to themselves and others, are dumped on the street and left to rot amongst the crowd. Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of lip service are expended in the name of solving these crises, while Third Avenue remains exactly as unsafe as it was four years ago.

The fact that it was Shawn Yim crushes me.

A robust and friendly man, one of the few Korean Americans at Atlantic Base besides myself. I rarely brought up our shared heritage but it was always there between us, an unspoken bond the others couldn’t share. We would joke about the miserable state of things, the jesting laughs of our brief interactions emboldening us to carry onward. “I don’t know how you do it, Nate,” he’d smile, watching my enthusiasm as I prepped for another night on my 7.

It happened five minutes into his last trip of his shift. 

Home stretch, almost done. He probably took the piece (we call shifts pieces) thinking this’ll be easy, route 70 at night no big deal, nice easy route during the hours when there’s no traffic, even better. What was he saving up for, working all those hours?

The pain of losing Shawn is the fact that I always hoped to know him better. We were both of us continuously in motion, rushing through our lives, aware that we’d get more out of knowing each other but, you know, duty calls. Our friendship was a lifetime of unfinished conversations. Who was he, deep down?

The two of us standing by the microwave, Shawn with his polished wire-frame glasses and trademark light blue oxford–only senior operators wear those, because the uniform store no longer makes them – with a reflective vest on top. His bald head and thoughtful eyes plus the professionalism of the glasses, contrasted with that safety vest, cast him as a sort of urban intellectual, the kind of person you can’t quite pin down, because they don’t fit into any one box.

I always wanted to ask another question, share a little more. He knew my partner, and would joke about how good her Korean is.

“That’s so creepy, you sound like my sister!” he’d tell her, laughing with that handsome, tired smile of his. Other times he’d be driving the bus I was riding, and we’d wax reflectively about human nature and the state of the city.

Of course I wish I could remember our exact conversations. But how can I, sitting as I am in the shell-shocked immensity that is violent death? At least I can still recall the feeling, the easy sensation of another day with one of your favorite coworkers, joking the trip away while watching the road together. He was so good at letting me be myself, even when he had different views. I did the same for him. We never tried to change each other. Talking with him brought me joy.

Why do we delay the things that matter most?

It is the City’s responsibility – our leaders and ourselves – to make Seattle safe. To foster environments where people don’t have to risk damage and death by merely using transit. After all that has happened and continues to happen, who among our leaders would dare to say meaningful progress has been made? My friends on the street and I know differently. We watch and wait as ever we have, waiting for legislation that could so easily reverse a lot of the things Seattleites have to suffer, waiting for someone with the agency and power and courage to come forward and make some real moves. That person will be named a hero.

But whoever they end up being, they will be too late for Shawn Yim.

The post The View From Nathan’s Bus: Shawn Yim and Keeping Transit Safe first appeared on The Urbanist.

A multi-billion dollar shortfall is forcing a choice between doubling down on highway expansion or a new path.

Ahead of the 2025 legislative session, a significant amount of focus is on the more than $12 billion deficit in the state’s operating budget projected over the next four years, a significant task for lawmakers to deal with over their 105 days. But lurking behind problems with the operating budget is a more systemic issue that’s set to come to a head this year: the long-term sustainability of the state’s transportation budget.

With a $14.6 billion allotted for the current biennium, Washington’s transportation budget ensures more than 7,000 miles of state highways keep functioning, keeps Washington State Ferries moving, and provides funding for a range of multimodal transportation options, including airports, Amtrak Cascades and freight railroads, and local bike and pedestrian projects. Also included in the transportation budget are agencies like Washington State Patrol and the state’s Department of Licensing.

Declining transportation revenue and increased project costs are clashing directly into long-promised highway projects and other state commitments, with badly needed investments in transit, active transportation, and traffic safety all fighting for a seat at the table. A state senate transportation committee staff presentation earlier this month detailed a budget gap of at least $6.5 billion through 2031, if significant action isn’t taken.

The crisis has been building for years. Despite state climate goals, the long-term solvency of the transportation budget has long depended on Washington’s gasoline tax, with forecasts — as recently as earlier this year — projecting the state to continue to increase overall gas usage in perpetuity. In 2003, 2005, 2015 and 2019, the state legislature bonded against motor vehicle fuel taxes, which include those on gas and diesel, to provide funding for transportation packages that largely focused on expanding the state highway network. The most recent 2019 bond issue approved to move up the timeline for the I-405 widening on the Eastside and the Puget Sound Gateway highway extension projects.

After years of rosy forecasts of future gas tax revenues, a new reality is starting to set in, prompted by a new revenue forecast model created by the Washington Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, which took over modeling transportation revenue after a 2023 change in state law. That new model is good news for the climate, and bad news for the gas-tax-centric transportation budget. It assumes that Washington hit peak gas consumption in 2018, with vehicle electrification and post-pandemic travel habits set to equate to declining gas usage moving forward.

Compared to the gas tax forecasts that were used to put together the 2022 Move Ahead Washington transportation package, the state is now projected to bring in 10% less revenue from fuel taxes over the current biennium. The erosion of gas tax revenues escalates to 20% less in the 2029-2031 biennium — this downward trend translates to $2.2 billion simply evaporating over eight years. At the same time, gas tax revenue is still funding debt service on past transportation packages, leaving even less for current projects. By 2025, 75% of total gas tax revenue is expected to go toward debt service, according to a Puget Sound Regional Council presentation earlier this month.

Governor Jay Inslee’s budget, released last week, doesn’t offer much help when it comes to long-term solutions. While Inslee has proposed progressive revenue sources like a 1% wealth tax and an increase in the state’s business and operations (B&O) tax to aid in balancing the operating budget without massive cuts, his budget actually increases the deficit projected in the transportation budget for the 2027-2029 biennium, leaving the really tough decisions to incoming Governor Bob Ferguson and the legislature.

The Governor’s budget proposal makes it clear that the Senate and House transportation committees have a lot of work to do. “A funding gap for highway projects will require legislators to explore options to adjust delivery timelines or funding,” it notes.

Climate Commitment Act revenue isn’t meeting expectations

Separate from the gas tax’s new normal, storm clouds are also brewing when it comes another major source of transportation funding, the Climate Commitment Act (CCA). The landmark 2021 climate law that created a second-in-the-nation cap-and-invest program, the CCA is the primary source of revenue for Move Ahead Washington projects that aren’t focused on highway capacity — including a long list of bike and pedestrian projects in every corner of the state and the biggest state-level investment in public transit in decades.

Those multimodal projects are clearly popular with voters, given the fact that Initiative 2117, a measure that would have repealed the CCA and cancelled all future carbon auctions, failed spectacularly during November’s election. A majority of voters in 24 of 39 counties rejected the idea of getting rid of the CCA, but what investments it will be able to fund depends entirely on the amount of revenue generated at auction.

All three of Washington’s state budgets — operating, capital, and transportation — receive revenue from the CCA, but it’s the transportation budget where revenues are directed first, by law, to be used to decarbonize the state’s transportation system. Currently, the CCA is funding around 9% of the state transportation budget. Though the most recent carbon auction garnered a per-ton price that’s up over the previous auction earlier this year, those prices are still below what was assumed when the Move Ahead Washington package was being assembled in 2022, by around a half billion dollars per biennium.

Original projections assumed that the CCA would bring in $2.8 billion over the current 2023-2025 biennium, but auctions are now projected to bring in just $2.3 billion, with a similar drop in the forecast for the 2025-2027 biennium, from $2.1 billion to $1.6 billion. If that trend holds, it makes the promises included in Move Ahead Washington, such as $50 million in upgrades for North Seattle’s stretch of Aurora Avenue and $25 million for Bremerton’s Warren Avenue bridge, harder to fulfill.

A planned linkage with the carbon markets in California and Quebec, introduced partially in response to complaints that the CCA was impacting Washington’s gasoline prices, has the potential to keep that per-ton price low, forcing lawmakers to either delay projects or find a way to make up the difference.

“You have an underlying problem, and this is a budget problem/challenge for the three budgets collectively to determine how to solve,” Byron Moore, a policy analyst with the senate transportation committee, told lawmakers early this month in breaking down the $500 million projected shortfall per biennium. “So that’s one issue which I’d characterize as more of an immediate problem, and then you can also see that regardless of that challenge, the Climate Commitment Act dollars are projected to decline over time going forward, which creates additional pressure in terms of the spending that’s associated, on all three budgets.”

The shortfall in CCA revenue suggests that transit, bike, pedestrian, and ferry funding could also see cuts or project delays if the state isn’t able to find a viable path forward.

Project cost increases continue to stack up

On top of declining revenue is another mounting issue that lawmakers will finally have to reckon with: skyrocketing price increases impacting highway expansion projects. This trend is starkly illustrated by the SR 520 Portage Bay Bridge and Roanoke Lid project in Seattle, which saw its total cost increase 70% over initial estimates when it went to bid last year. Highway megaprojects around the state are all costing much more than the state originally assumed they would.

With highway spending already at its highest level in decades, the cost increases are poised to add at least another $1 billion to the transportation budget’s balance sheet — and those are just the increases we know about. On top of an additional $271 million for the North Spokane Corridor, $335 million for the widening of US 12 near Walla Walla, and $155 million for the Puget Sound Gateway, risk assessments still haven’t been released for other megaprojects including the I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement in Clark County, which is set to be the most expensive project in Pacific Northwest history. Even though the State of Oregon — despite significant budget issues of its own — has committed $1 billion to the bridge, the project is still not fully funded as it heads toward a groundbreaking targeted for 2026 or 2027.

On top of that, the state still needs to find a way to fund an additional $5 billion in culvert replacements along highways across the state, a requirement that stems from a 2001 lawsuit seeking to improve fish passage to aid salmon recovery. So far WSDOT has been able to complete 50% of the required barrier removal, but the work that remains is set to be exponentially more expensive on a per-culvert basis. Nonetheless, the agency faces a deadline of 2030 to install 90% of the culverts covered under the court order.

All that is happening against a backdrop of a state transportation budget that has prioritized expansion projects over basic maintenance and preservation for at least two decades. WSDOT estimates a $1.5 billion per year shortfall between existing revenue and what’s needed to keep the transportation system in a state of good repair. The state is facing significant maintenance needs in every corner of the state, yet maintenance and preservation have only accounted for around 10% of the transportation budget in recent years.

The cherry on top is the incoming Trump administration, which is almost certainly going to reassess federal spending priorities when it comes to transportation. The first Trump administration slashed transit grants and failed to pass a major infrastructure bill. Move Ahead Washington assumed the state would be able to win $650 million in competitive federal grants over its 16 years, but some of that spending is poised to evaporate over the next four years.

What to do about revenue?

Facing budget pressures from all sides, the search for potential new transportation revenue sources is expected to be a major focus in 2025, but the number of options available to legislators isn’t huge. The goal of a permanent replacement for the gas tax, in the form of a per-mile Road Usage Charge (RUC) that treats all vehicles equally regardless of fuel efficiency, still looks to be heavy lift. The state has been exploring the idea in some form since 2011, with the Washington Transportation Commission continuing to develop recommendations on what a program would look, but it’s still unclear whether lawmakers are ready to tackle the issue.

A bill implementing a voluntary RUC, aligned with Oregon’s existing program, failed to advance out of committee in 2023 and wasn’t even discussed during the 2024 session. However, the stark reality of gas tax revenue declining even faster than policymakers had expected might be a strong impetus toward action in 2025. Marko Liias, chair of the Senate’s transportation committee, told KING 5 earlier this year that lawmakers needed to start discussing the idea, after stating that a direct increase to the state’s gas tax is at the bottom of his list of preferred revenue options.

While the state’s gas tax is directly tied to “highway purposes” thanks to a 1944 amendment to the state constitution, a RUC wouldn’t face the same constitutional restrictions. Though some lawmakers want to write similar highway-only restrictions into law, the proposed RUC could provide a direct way to fund badly needed multimodal investments around the state, not just those tied to the state highway network.

Other ideas are percolating. A study looking at a potential fee on retail delivery orders found that 30 cents per delivery could generate an additional $45 to $112 million by 2026, growing to as much as $160 million by 2030. Such a fee is already in place in Colorado, with the fee indexed to inflation to ensure the revenue source doesn’t diminish over time. But in a year when the legislature is already set to examine numerous new tax proposals to aid the operating budget, new transportation revenue options face significant headwinds.

Another option set to get more attention this session is the idea of dedicating the portion of state sales tax generated by the sale of motor vehicles to transportation. A pet issue on the Republican side of the aisle for years, that proposal ultimately doesn’t advance the state very far and ultimately just reallocates funding from other areas that are struggling, including schools and mental healthcare.

Ultimately, if the legislature does decide to use additional revenue to shore up highway projects while leaving maintenance, preservation, and safety out in the cold, that will do very little to alleviate the long-term issues with the state transportation system. In remarks delivered this month, outgoing WSDOT Secretary Roger Millar offered a foreboding warning about continuing to disinvest in maintenance.

“I am concerned, absent investment in maintenance and preservation and safety and operations, our system will not be reliable,” Millar said. “All I need to do is have one bridge on I-90 between Idaho and Seattle become load-restricted, and every truck on that highway will no longer be able to be loaded 80,000 pounds. The same thing on I-5, and that is coming.”

While significant cuts are certainly on the table as legislators consider their options, a full realignment of the state’s transportation budget could offer an opportunity to bring state spending in line with its climate goals. That would entail far greater focus on maintenance over highway expansion and providing funding for options that allow people to get around without cars. Doubling down on the highway project list is one way to ensure that the can is simply kicked further down the road.

The post The Washington State Transportation Budget Is In Deep Trouble first appeared on The Urbanist.

Despite intending to choose a voting day that’s best for voters, timing could still be easier—but legislators can fix that.

The post The History of Washington’s Wandering Election Day appeared first on Sightline Institute.

Takeaways First-time candidate for Seattle City Council Alexis Mercedes Rinck just got more votes in her 2024 race than the city’s mayor, Bruce Harrell, when he won in 2021. In fact, she got more votes than any elected official in all elections that Seattle city government has ever recorded.  But it’s not because she’s particularly popular. ... Read more

The post A Magic Boost for Low-Turnout City Elections appeared first on Sightline Institute.

Takeaways The claim comes again and again like clockwork: That allowing homes to exist can be hazardous to a politician’s career.  Even at the annual picnic of her own neighborhood association, surrounded by pasta salad and barbeque, Jessica Bateman couldn’t escape the threat.  It was summer 2019. In her first term as a city councilor in Olympia, ... Read more

The post In Race after Race, People Keep Electing Pro-Housing Politicians appeared first on Sightline Institute.

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.

So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet or whip them to loft a meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.

Today’s plant-based eggs still fall short of that one-size-fits-all goal, but researchers in industry and academia are trying to improve them. New ingredients and processes are leading toward egg substitutes that are not just more egg-like, but potentially more nutritious and better tasting than the original.

In practice, making a convincing plant-based egg is largely a matter of mimicking the way the ovalbumin and other proteins in real eggs behave during cooking. When egg proteins are heated beyond a critical point, they unfold and grab onto one another, forming what food scientists call a gel. That causes the white and then the yolk to set up when cooked.

Eggs aren’t just for frying or scrambling. Cooks use them to bind other ingredients together and to emulsify oil and water to make mayonnaise. The proteins in egg whites can also be whipped into a foam that’s essential in meringues and angel food cake. Finding a plant-based egg substitute that does all of these things has proven challenging. Credit: Adam Gault via Getty

That’s not easy to replicate with some plant proteins, which tend to have more sulfur-containing amino acids than egg proteins do. These sulfur groups bind to each other, so the proteins unfold at higher temperatures. As a result, they must usually be cooked longer and hotter than ones in real eggs.

To make a plant-based egg, food scientists typically start by extracting a mix of proteins from a plant source such as soybean, mung bean, or other crops. “You want to start with what is a sustainable, affordable, and consistent source of plant proteins,” says McClements, who wrote about the design of plant-based foods in the 2024 Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. “So you’re going to narrow your search to that group of proteins that are economically feasible to use.”

Fortunately, some extracts are dominated by one or a few proteins that set at low-enough temperatures to behave pretty much like real egg proteins. Current plant-based eggs rely on these proteins: Just Egg uses the plant albumins and globulin found in mung bean extract, Simply Eggless uses proteins from lupin beans, and McClements and others are experimenting with the photosynthetic enzyme rubisco that is abundant in duckweed and other leafy tissues.

These days, food technologists can produce a wide range of proteins in large quantities by inserting the gene for a selected protein into hosts like bacteria or yeast, then growing the hosts in a tank, a process called precision fermentation. That opens a huge new window for exploration of other plant-based protein sources that may more precisely match the properties of actual eggs.

A few companies are already searching. Shiru, a California-based biotech company, for example, uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence platform to identify proteins with specific properties from its database of more than 450 million natural protein sequences. To find a more egglike plant protein, the company first picked the criteria it needed to match. “For eggs, that is the thermal gel onset—that is, when it goes from liquid to solid when you heat it,” says Jasmin Hume, a protein engineer who is the company’s founder and CEO. “And it must result in the right texture—not too hard, not too gummy, not too soft.” Those properties depend on details such as which amino acids a protein contains, in what order, and precisely how it folds into a 3D structure—a hugely complex process that was the subject of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The company then scoured its database, winnowing it down to a short list that it predicted would fit the bill. Technicians produced those proteins and tested their properties, pinpointing a handful of potential egglike proteins. A few were good enough to start the company working to commercialize their production, though Hume declined to provide further details.

Cracking the flavor code

With the main protein in hand, the next step for food technologists is to add other molecules that help make the product more egglike. Adding vegetable oils, for example, can change the texture. “If I don’t put any oil in the product, it’s going to scramble more like an egg white,” says Chris Jones, a chef who is vice president of product development at Eat Just, which produces the egg substitute Just Egg. “If I put 8 to 15 percent, it’s going to scramble like a whole egg. If I add more, it’s going to behave like a batter.”

Developers can also add gums to prevent the protein in the mixture from settling during storage, or add molecules that are translucent at room temperature but turn opaque when cooked, providing the same visual cue to doneness that real eggs provide.

And then there’s the taste: Current plant-based eggs often suffer from off flavors. “Our first version tasted like what you imagine the bottom of a lawn mower deck would taste like—really grassy,” says Jones. The company’s current product, version 5, still has some beany notes, he says.

Those beany flavors aren’t caused by a single molecule, says Devin Peterson, a flavor chemist at Ohio State University: “It’s a combination that creates beany.” Protein extracts from legumes contain enzymes that create some of these off-flavor volatile molecules—and it’s a painstaking process to single out the offending volatiles and avoid or remove them, he says. (Presumably, cooking up single proteins in a vat could reduce this problem.) Many plant proteins also have molecules called polyphenols bound to their surfaces that contribute to beany flavors. “It’s very challenging to remove these polyphenols, because they’re tightly stuck,” says McClements.

Experts agree that eliminating beany and other off flavors is a good thing. But there’s less agreement on whether developers need to actively make a plant-based egg taste more like a real egg. “That’s actually a polarizing question,” says Jones.

Much of an egg’s flavor comes from sulfur compounds that aren’t necessarily pleasing to consumers. “An egg tastes a certain way because it’s releasing sulfur as it decays,” says Jones. When tasters were asked to compare Eat Just’s egg-free mayonnaise against the traditional, real-egg version, he notes, “at least 50 percent didn’t like the sulfur flavor of a true-egg mayo.”

That poses a quandary for developers. “Should it have a sulfur flavor, or should it have its own point of view, a flavor that our chefs develop? We don’t have an answer yet,” Jones says. Even for something like an omelet, he says, developers could aim for “a neutral spot where whatever seasoning you add is what you’re going to taste.”

As food technologists work to overcome these challenges, plant-based eggs are likely to get better and better. But the ultimate goal might be to surpass, not merely match, the performance of real eggs. Already, McClements and his colleagues have experimented with adding lutein, a nutrient important for eye health, to oil droplets in plant-based egg yolks.

In the future, scientists could adjust the amino acid composition of proteins or boost the calcium or iron content in plant-based eggs to match nutritional needs. “We ultimately could engineer something that’s way healthier than what’s available now,” says Bianca Datta, a food scientist at the Good Food Institute, an international nonprofit that supports the development of plant-based foods. “We’re just at the beginning of seeing what’s possible.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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