Oxford Economics, a research firm based in the U.K., has released a 2026 Global Cities index which ranks a thousand cities around the world based on five performance benchmarks. Oxford ranks Seattle fourth, right behind New York, London and Paris. Our aspirations to be “world class” seem to have been achieved.
Our region does have many positive qualities, and it is nice to see that recognized. However, a close look at the ranking methodology is in order before anybody in city hall issues a press release touting Seattle’s rise among the global elite.
Even though the ranking refers to cities, the fine print indicates it is actually based on metropolitan areas. Livability, taxation, and the quality of public services vary greatly across a large metro area, as is obvious in the Puget Sound region. The Oxford rankings don’t reflect that variation or what it means for residential and business location decisions. For example, you may have noticed that about third of the office space in downtown Seattle is currently vacant. Apparently the businesses that moved out didn’t consult the Oxford rankings before they decided the business climate was superior in other cities.
The quality of municipal government is a key determinant of a city’s competitiveness nationally and globally. Strangely, Oxford rankings apply the same governance score to all cities in the United States, as though Federal government policy was all that mattered. This fails to reflect how much local and state-level government influences livability and economic activity. Under the Oxford criteria Seattle gets the same governance score as Detroit, Baltimore and Tucson, thus totally obscuring the important differences in tax rates and public services among U.S. cities.
The Oxford methodology takes into consideration “political and institutional stability”. Stability is a good thing when governmental institutions are doing a responsible job of providing essential public services. It isn’t such a good thing when an entrenched majority party operates without accountability and resists reform. How the Oxford rankings quantify the pros and cons of local and national institutional stability is unclear, but in an increasingly dynamic world institutional stability may be less important than adaptability.
A common problem with global comparisons of cities and regions is that they often rely on data that is several years out of date. The Oxford rankings claim to be forward-looking using forecasts extending out to 2050, but what forecasts they have used is unclear. For the Puget Sound region performance trends and long-range forecasts provide a sense of the challenges that lie ahead. In particular, ominous transportation system performance trends cast doubt on how effectively government is addressing future needs. For example:
- WSDOT has a billion dollar per year unfunded backlog in maintenance and preservation. This has put the state highway system on a “glide-path to failure” and is causing an increase in road hazards as well as much higher future costs for highway and bridge repairs. The deteriorating condition of state transportation assets is despite a gas tax and carbon emission fee that makes gas and diesel prices in Washington among the highest in the U.S.
- More than thirty percent of Seattle’s streets are classified as being in “poor” or “very poor” condition, but the $1.55 billion transportation levy approved by voters in 2024 spends most of the revenue on other things, so condition of the city’s streets is expected to further deteriorate.
- The Seattle area has among the highest transit taxes in the U.S. but transit ridership is lower today than it was ten years ago and transit’s share of all trips in the region has shrunk to about 3%.
- As a result of rampant fare evasion about a third of riders on Metro and Sound Transit don’t pay a fare. Taxpayers now subsidize about 90% of transit operating costs.
- Sound Transit plans to spend over $150 billion on the ST3 plan but light rail is forecast to carry only 2% of daily person-trips in the region by 2050.
- The Puget Sound Regional Council forecasts traffic congestion will increase by 54% by 2050.
It is hard to see how a supposedly forward-looking ranking could give the Seattle area high governance scores given the region’s high taxes, dismal trends, and ineffective plans.
The near-term outlook may be discouraging, but there is a positive side to consider. Budgets and efficient management of public resources are things government can control. Far better outcomes could be achieved with existing revenues if the agencies responsible adopted sensible plans and exercised better oversight. In other words, if the Puget Sound region really wants to be in the upper echelon of global metropolitan areas it has the ability to do so, but to make that happen we shouldn’t focus on comparisons with Paris, Zurich, and Kuala Lumpur. What matters is how efficiently government uses the resources at its disposal. By that crucial measure our region has a lot of room for improvement.
