Tag Archives: pedestrian

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.

Queen Anne, the Waterfront is Yours (Almost)!

(Image: ABKJ Consulting)

As the crow flies, it’s not very far from lower Queen Anne to Seattle’s waterfront, but good luck getting a crow to fly you there.

Up to now, walkers and cyclists had to negotiate busy boulevards and railways to reach the Sound’s edge.

But as of mid-September-ish–a temporary suspended work platform for the Thomas Street Overpass project came down last week–there will be an easy, unobstructed stroll from Third Avenue West to the Elliott Bay Trail as it passes through Myrtle Edwards Park.

The Elliott Bay Trail is just under three miles in length, but provides a wealth of scenic views, and you can continue on northward from Magnolia’s Smith Cove to Discovery Park, if you’d like more of a workout. Heading south as you leave the overpass will connect you with the waterfront promenade on Alaskan Way, or to the west, the Olympic Sculpture Park.

The 10-foot-wide overpass itself stretches a little over 900 feet. ABKJ was the primary consultant on the project, and notes there is a “97’ span over five BNSF railway lines and a 99’ span over Elliott Avenue.”

Third Avenue West entrance to Thomas Street Overpass (Photo: MvB)
Thomas Street Overpass, looking west (Photo: MvB)
The Thomas Street Overpass from Elliott Avenue West (Photo: MvB)

The project has had several theoretical opening dates–it was supposed to be finished in spring of 2012, then it was July, then it was August. The last hold-up has been the installation of handrails, which were being shipped in separate pieces and installed as they arrived.

 

Seattle’s War on Cars Fails, Again, to Achieve Predicted Nightmare Outcomes

(Image: SDOT)

With a full year of traffic data under their belts, Seattle’s Department of Transportation is reporting on how the Nickerson Street “road diet” affected traffic. Average weekday traffic was down one percent, to 18,300 vehicles from 18,500. SDOT has not been able to find evidence of diversion to alternate streets.

On the safety side, the primary reason for the rechannelization that converted the four-lane road into two lanes, collisions were down 23 percent compared to a five-year average, the speeding population dropped 60 percent, and the number of people doing 10 or more miles over the speed limit was down 90 percent.

The $242,000 project included pedestrian crossing improvements at three locations, smoothing a sharp curve, a two-way left turn lane in the middle, and an uphill bicycle lane. Though Nickerson was Seattle’s 28th road diet (as of March 2012 we have had 36 battles in the “war on cars”), the proposal was met by substantial outrage from people who argued that a four-lane road could not be reduced to two lanes without traffic volume being cut drastically.

On neighborhood blog Magnolia Voice, the community appeared split on the viability of a change that, remember, had been successfully implemented 27 times since 1972:

A survey we took back in June indicated that, of the 711 who participated, 48.4 percent were in support of the road diet, while 51.6 percent were against the plan.  The topic generated more discussion on this site than any other topic we have ever posted.

At the time, the City Council’s transportation committee chair, Tom Rasmussen, wanted to delay the project “until 2016 — when other corridors including two-way Mercer Street and the Alaskan Way Tunnel are completed, and their traffic detours let up.”

UPDATE: Rasmussen’s office has written in, claiming that he was incorrectly characterized in the Seattle Times: “The reference to waiting until 2016 for changes to Nickerson came from a letter from Mayor Nickels when he was in office that Tom was paraphrasing at the MDC meeting in 2010. Tom was never advocating for waiting. He was only interested in receiving more information from all viewpoints to be able to make a subsequent decision if the city council decided to weigh in.” You can decide if “receiving more information from all viewpoints” would result in what’s more prosaically known as waiting.

The Manufacturing Industrial Council (MIC) also complained that freight mobility would suffer. (Freight use of Nickerson Street post-diet hasn’t declined at all–it’s actually up slightly.)

Because bicyclists were for the proposal, it had to be bad for cars. A Crosscut guest editorialist opined that “Losing lanes to bikes will produce a jobs exodus.” And things went from there. KING 5 included road diets in their “war on cars” segment. “The Emerald City has been put on a road diet,” proclaimed FOX News.

SDOT actually tried to mollify people by pointing out that many of the changes simply involved paint, and if it didn’t work–if this 27th Seattle road rechannelization didn’t work–they could always switch it back, and people could return to traveling at in-city speeds that kill pedestrians. A year later, it’s not as easy to find people arguing for SDOT to road binge.