Traffic deaths on stretches of Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Seattle have doubled in the last five-year period, despite the city’s goal to reach zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
A KUOW analysis of recent city data shows how a city-wide push to lower speed limits can improve some elements of safety – but experts say there is still work to do when it comes to slowing drivers down and keeping pedestrians safe.
I know the area being discussed in this article very well and spend time in it regularly.
As much as I appreciate KUOW’s reporting here, there are some core facets that I always want to see addressed:
This last one is key. And before I get yelled at for victim blaming, hear me out. I know these streets. Compared to the rest of the city, this corridor of Seattle has multiple residences designed to support substance abuse recovery (featuring in-house medical care and recovery resources). [ PS: DESC rules; all my homies love and donate to DESC. ]
As a result, compared to the rest of the city, there are just more people wandering around in the street in this area, many unemployed (giving them time to be out and about more), without cars, many living with adverse psychological conditions or in various phases of substance abuse suffering or recovery. So it’s not uncommon to see people wandering around, in intersections and in the streets (on foot, scooters and bikes) in wildly varying states of awareness.
What I don’t see in this article, and what I never see in any article about traffic safety in places like this and up north on Aurora Ave, is the inclusion of this population in the overall traffic safety picture. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable topic to navigate, but I think it’s worth the effort. My guess is that the hesitance to mention this is to avoid the public’s knee-jerk reaction to dump blame for traffic safety woes onto an already beleaguered and victimized minority. That sucks, and I don’t want to do that.
So how to do we make these streets less deadly, knowing that we’ve got an everyday higher-than-usual population of folks occasionally staggering around into streets and intersections (without the shitheel “just ship 'em away somewhere” answers)?
I don’t have a good solution for this, but we’re never going to come up with one if we continue to ignore this part of the picture. Slowing down traffic is definitely part of it, but I think coming up with a smart streetscape design that’s aware of this pedestrian challenge and makes some attempt to accommodate for it should be in there as well.
Build roads so people don’t feel like they can go fast without paying attention. People won’t go 70mph on a narrow street alongside a cliff. They’ll gun it down a long straight road.
I’m in Chicago and there’s about a mile of my commute that I’m certain has far higher pedestrian injuries than the rest for the same reason you mention. It’s a wide-open street, but I see at least two people every day crossing at random points when the way isn’t clear. The “make the road narrow so people slow down” fix people like to throw about here would likely make it more dangerous because there’d be less visibility.
Other sections have structural issues, but that area is social.
They need carers to supervise them. I’m guessing whoever runs the rehab has too few staff by far. Either intentionally or unintentionally. A lot of carers are getting deported and there’s a shortage for that and other reasons. As with most things, it comes down to the decay of capitalism.
Ultimately the answer, at least in my view, is that the people who need to be held responsible for road safety need to be the ones most capable of inflicting harm and most insulated from risk of harm. To be clear, when I say responsible I don’t just mean being punished when there is a fuck up, though there definitely needs to be that, I mean making an effort to ensure that drivers exhibit reasonable levels of competence and designing the environment they exist in to encourage safe behavior.