Prefab Flash Mob Kicks Off Umbrella-Driven Crosswalk Safety Campaign

Seattle is becoming flash mob town USA. This past Saturday, December 4, local choreographers Bobby Bonsey and Beth Meberg, along with 50 or so other Seattleites, entertained holiday shoppers in Occidental Park and Westlake Center by dancing to an "Umbrella/Singin' in the Rain" mashup inspired by a recent episode of Glee.

You wouldn't think there was anything there to get cranky about, but you underestimate Seattle curmudgeonry. All the umbrella-waving was the showy part of SDOT's new $50,000 pedestrian-awareness campaign, designed to make drivers remember that colliding with people in crosswalks is rude. As KING 5 told it, via an interview with a disgruntled business owner who was upset that ice makes steep hills difficult to drive on with winter:

"You could hear as a truck or a car lose traction on that hill and start to go sideways," said Bevis. He says the slippery slope cost him three days of business. Now, he complains SDOT is spending $47,000 on the umbrella campaign, which is funded by the "Bridging the Gap" levy passed by voters four years ago.

That makes it sound like the city is spending $47,000 on umbrellas, which is far from the truth. Most of the money is going for "Metro bus ads, posters, stickers on pay stations, window displays, and publicity events"--just $5,000 went for the brightly covered umbrellas, which are meant for downtown shoppers to use and then leave for the next person. (If you see someone wandering around outside of downtown with an umbrella that says SDOT on it, you'll know they're a thief.)

Metro bus advertising, besides reaching exactly the people who need to be reminded to look for pedestrians, supports transit service, so the money actually ends up working pretty hard for the public. 

That's not good enough for Crosscut, who label the initiative a boondoggle. "Wouldn't that $50,000 save more lives if applied to law enforcement or the social safety net, if it prevented one more murder by a mentally ill person not getting the right help?" asked Knute Berger. Save one life?

It took Publicola's Erica Barnett to dig up real numbers on pedestrian safety, noting that in winter car v. pedestrian collisions double from summer; they reached a "high of 194 in November (and 184 in January)" from 2006 to '08. That's over two people struck by a car per day in November and in January. 

As Seattle Transit Blog notes, the negative media stories never manage to include the part about people getting run over in crosswalks--they avoided it entirely. Someone ought to develop an awareness campaign about that.