Tag Archives: hit-and-run

News, Transportation

Seattle Drivers Not Sure if They Have Hit Everyone Yet

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Accident-plagued Dexter is one of SDOT’s most heavily-reconfigured streets. (Photo: SDOT)

Who knew that a lack of rain would make Seattle drivers even worse? At midnight, record-keepers will be marking into the books the first all-dry July in 50 years. But along with the terrific weather has come an alarming rise in cars colliding with bikes and pedestrians.

Is it just more people taking to their bikes in the good weather? Seattle’s Department of Transportation told the Seattle Times last year that: “When more cyclists are present, motorists become more conscious of them and safety tends to improve.”

Yet the City Council’s Richard Conlin is nursing a broken shoulder blade, after a driver flipped a quick U-turn in front of him and Conlin rode into the vehicular barricade. Though the driver was cited for making an illegal U-turn, Conlin’s recap of the incident — “He wasn’t looking, I probably could have been a little more defensive” — exhibits what Sightline’s Alan Durning calls “car-head.”

Conlin could have been killed in the accident (you just have to fall the wrong way after being launched over the handlebars), but he’s equating the driver’s carelessness with a multi-ton, motor vehicle with his own responsibility to avoid being crushed by a car. It’s a transportation version of Stockholm Syndrome; Conlin later released a statement in which he reassured everyone he doesn’t “expect this accident to influence my work on transportation issues or alter my perspective on cycling.”

In Durning’s case, he’d biked right into a red Jeep Cherokee parked in the bike lane on Dexter. He was berating himself for being an inattentive idiot when he thought, Wait a minute, this is a bike lane. If the driver had parked his car in the middle of the road and walked off, and Durning had driven his car into the back of it, would he have been thinking, My god, what a klutz I am?

“Car-headed as we are in North America,” writes Durning, “we don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians.” The driver who sent Conlin to the emergency room will have to pay a $124 ticket.

Not everyone has Conlin’s health insurance and wherewithal. Brandon Blake also had a driver turn in front of him on Dexter, and “suffered several fractured ribs, bruising to his lungs, face fractures in several places and a concussion.” Friends and family have started an online fundraiser to help deal with the bills.

Each time Seattle Bike Blog reports on one of these major incidents, you learn of a multitude of “little” accidents that weren’t reported — each a potential fatality.

Blake, a Sounders fan, has something in common now with 33-year-old Sounders defender Taylor Graham, who tweeted on July 29th: “If you are the car that just hit a guy riding his bike on Dexter and took off, that was me.” One of the replies to that tweet was from Eric Cockrell, who had his own two bits to put in: “car hit me before the Denny light on Dexter yesterday.”

News, Politics, Transportation

Will Road Rage in Sleepy West Seattle Fuel Drive for Street Safety?

“It’s not easy being green” applies to bike lanes, too. (Photo: MvB)

Seattle police are, this morning, on the hunt for a woman who hit a 24-year-old man with her car, near the 9400 block of 11th Avenue Southwest in West Seattle. Police say it was intentional, and they know who she is. [UPDATE: KOMO says the woman has been arrested.]

A little over a week ago, West Seattle Greenways co-founder Jake Vanderplas was also the victim of an intentional hit-and-run on a new greenway. He escaped with bruises, and the officer who arrived on the scene afterwards “lamented that at times, cases like these (with no major injuries, property loss, or death) can sometimes slip through the cracks.” (If someone narrowly misses killing you with anything besides a car, you can still count on a strenuous police response.)

Now that both summer and summer weather have arrived, Seattleites are walking and biking everywhere — and getting hit, at an alarming rate, either intentionally or by drivers who never stop.

That Seattle Bike Blog story on Vanderplas unearthed another recent hit-and-run story in the comments, this time on the mean streets of Dexter and Nickerson. “Alana Martinez never saw the car” that struck her from behind, writes Tom Fucoloro, and the driver fled the scene. (View the Bikewise map to get an overall sense of the level of cycling danger.) [UPDATE: SDOT has already made improvements to that intersection, reports Seattle Bike Blog.]

Mayoral candidate Peter Steinbrueck, in a profile on the site Capitol Hill Seattle, says the need to increase safety on Seattle streets outweighs even transit: “The highest priority for me is pedestrian and bicycle safety, because those are the most vulnerable on the street and because we lose 10 to 15 people a year in pedestrian-vehicular conflict.”

Today, Mayor McGinn is holding a press conference to discuss proposals to improve safety on Northeast 75th Street, the scene of something along the lines of vehicular mass murder in March of this year. (Within days of the tragedy, residents were noting how drivers’ speeds on the street had resumed their earlier unsafe and illegal heights.)

To give you an idea of the current pace of change, though, when it comes to more significant expense than signs and paint, remember that in November 2006, 26-year-old Tatsuo Nakata was killed by a car while he was in the crosswalk at 47th and Admiral in West Seattle.

Five years later, residents were still holding memorials-slash-rallies for a traffic light. Nor were these voices crying out in the wilderness; West Seattle Blog saw “former Seattle City Councilmember David Della, for whom Mr. Nakata had worked, and current Councilmember Tom Rasmussen, who chairs the Transportation Committee, as well as ANA president Katy Walum and vice president Karl de Jong” speaking in favor of greater safety measures for the intersection.

This June, approaching seven full years after the fatality, the City Council announced they planned to fund “full signalization” (and top Mayor McGinn’s proposal of a pedestrian beacon, while they were at it).

That’s one intersection improved, but for every step toward safety, it seems the city takes several more backwards: Seattle’s Department of Transportation continues to grant developers the right to push pedestrians into the street for months at a time, with no evidence that they comprehend their complicity in creating unsafe streets.