“Spending on safety isn’t making Seattle streets less hazardous”
This unequivocal headline in the Seattle Times is completely false. The op-ed it is attached to uses a very misleading analysis of available data to draw the unsupported conclusion that safe streets projects actually make Seattle more dangerous, not less. In fact, the author argues without a shred of evidence, safety would improve if the city instead focused on reducing car congestion.
The most obvious and glaring issue that supersedes all the others in this piece is that the vast majority of Seattle’s traffic deaths an injuries are happening on wide multi-lane streets where Seattle has not yet invested in a significant safety project. It is disingenuous at best to say that “spending on safety isn’t making Seattle streets less hazardous” when the city has not spent money on safety for the streets with the majority of hazards. 80% of Seattle’s pedestrian deaths occur on streets with multiple lanes traveling in the same direction, and when SDOT does carry out Vision Zero corridor projects on such streets they consistently reduce and often nearly eliminate injuries and deaths. The problem is that that the city has a huge backlog of dangerous streets to improve, and leaders have lacked the political will to make changes on the biggest problem streets like the persistent list-topping dangerous streets Aurora, Rainier Ave, MLK Way, Lake City Way, 4th Ave S as well as a long list of other persistent problem streets like 5th Ave downtown, SW Roxbury Street, Fauntleroy Way, SW Sylvan Way, Michigan Street in Georgetown, 1st Ave in downtown through to Georgetown, Holman Road, Northgate Way, NE 50th Street, N 85th Street, Jackson Street, and on and on.
As Gordon Padelford, Executive Director of the Seattle Streets Alliance, wrote in his retort published Thursday in the Times (Seattle Library link), “the solutions to keep people safe while traveling on our streets are known. The problem has been a lack of political will — at all levels of government.”
Federal policies could help through safer vehicle design like European style mandates for safer vehicle front ends, passive in-vehicle drunken driving prevention, Intelligence Speed Assistance and distracted driving detection. But sadly, adoption of these lifesaving technologies are not expected anytime soon.
At the state level, despite being named a top priority, direct safety investment represents less than 5% of the state’s biennial transportation budget, according to the Transportation Choices Coalition. And the Washington State Department of Transportation needs additional policy direction to prioritize its responsibility to help redesign dangerous state routes that run through communities, like State Route 99 (Aurora Avenue North) and State Route 522 (Lake City Way).
And at the city level, Seattle has been talking about the same dangerous streets since the beginning of the Vision Zero program in 2015. In Seattle, 80% of pedestrian fatalities occur on multiple-lane arterials. In particular, the top five most dangerous streets have remained Aurora Ave North, Rainier Avenue South, Fourth Avenue South, Lake City Way Northeast, and MLK Jr. Way South. When the Seattle Department of Transportation has been allowed to make changes, like the reconfiguration of the section of Rainier Avenue South through Columbia City, it led to reductions in speeding, crashes, injuries and deaths. However, SDOT has not had the backing of previous mayors to implement full redesigns of our most dangerous streets.
Take one project as an example. There are as many as 80 of our neighbors happily living life who would have been seriously injured in a traffic collision on Rainier Avenue if it weren’t for a 2015 pilot project that redesigned a relatively short section of Rainier Avenue in the Columbia and Hillman City neighborhoods. As many as 10 of our neighbors might be dead. None of these people know that they were saved from serious injury or death because their collision never happened (one of the people saved could very well have been Nat Lehmans), but we know that from 2005 until 2015 an average of nine people were seriously injured and one person was killed in this one-mile stretch of Rainier Avenue every year. After the city’s Vision Zero team redesigned the street to get rid of many of the hazards caused by its previous multi-lane design, the serious injury numbers dropped dramatically and there has not been a fatality, according to data from the Washington State Traffic Safety Commission. There are still some serious injuries and there is no safe way to bike on the street, but even this still-incomplete project has made an enormous difference in a lot of people’s lives. When SDOT makes these changes, they work. The problem is that the city is completing these safety upgrades at a fraction of the rate we need, and there are far too many streets that remain outdated and dangerous.
Beware of disinformation about safety projects and congestion
The entire basis of Lehmans’ argument relies on a 2021 paper out of the University of Barcelona that looked at the relationship between traffic congestion (measured as time spent traveling below the speed limit) and safety outcomes in a bunch of European cities of various sizes. Though results were rather scattered, there was a trend suggesting that cities with the least congestion had dangerous streets, but so do the cities with the most congestion. This is an interesting result, but Lehmans commits the sin of conflating correlation with causation while also drawing some very questionable conclusions that suggest a core misunderstanding of how “congestion” works.
One big clue that this European study’s findings might not fit well in an American context in the way Lehmans suggests is that big US cities with the lowest traffic death rates are New York City (2.65 deaths per 100,000 residents), Boston (3.38), Seattle (4), Minneapolis (4.19) and Washington DC (4.82). TomTom’s data, the same data used in the Barcelona study, lists NYC, Boston, Seattle and Washington DC in the top 12 most congested regions in the country. This is at odds with what you would expect if the Europe study could be mapped to US cities. The US cities with the highest traffic death rates are the ones more dedicated to car infrastructure: Memphis (25.96 deaths per 100,000 residents), Detroit (21.47), Albuquerque (18.11), Tucson (17.02), and Kansas City Missouri (16.85). Memphis is 6 times higher than Seattle, which is truly horrifying when you remember that these are real people’s lives we’re talking about. These cities register throughout the low and mid levels on the TomTom congestion list with Kansas City coming in at number 6, Memphis at 20, Detroit at 25, Albuquerque at 54 and Tucson at 55. A not-so-fun fact I learned while living in Kansas City is that it has the highest number of freeway lane miles per capita of any large city in the country. Despite being number 6 on this congestion list, people there still complain about the traffic constantly (I still love Kansas City).
The problem is that Lehmans presents a grossly oversimplified concept of what causes congestion, stating without evidence that safety projects are the culprit. There are many congestion relief strategies that are common in Europe but almost unheard (or considered blasphemy) in the US. Many European cities have reduced congestion by reducing car access, such as schemes where people driving must use a ring road to access sections of the city but cannot drive between sections directly. Other cities have implemented a congestion pricing scheme that charges tolls to enter certain areas in order to manage congestion levels. Many European cities have nearly or completely banned cars from their city centers, which nearly all pre-date cars and often have skinny and winding streets with extremely limited space for parking. Curiously, Lehmans does not suggest any of these common European congestion relief strategies in their op-ed.
Safe streets projects also do not lead to congestion in the way Lehmans assumes in the op-ed. Many projects that remove extra through lanes to create space for turn lanes actually help vehicle flow because in an urban setting having people stop in the middle of a through lane to make a turn is ridiculous, dangerous and inefficient. The number of cars using NE 65th Street actually increased by up to 8% (PDF) after the safety project was complete, likely in part because it became easier and safer to make left turns on and off the street thanks to the new turn lanes. Car travel times stayed about the same eastbound but increased by 1.2 minutes westbound, though that was partly due to the 8% higher westbound car throughput (more cars cause more traffic). Meanwhile, serious collisions and high-end speeding both went way down while walking and biking went way up. Even if it measures slightly worse on TomTom’s congestion metrics, but the street was moving more people with a fraction of the danger. Dangerous streets are not better for drivers!
European cities are also far more likely to have connected networks of bike lanes, quality transit access and strong priority for pedestrian safety, all of which lead to less driving and less congestion. When a person needs to make a trip, they will choose the mode that works best for them. As traffic gets worse or more expensive (or biking, walking and transit get better), then people will look for options other than driving. The surest way to create a city with very heavy congestion is to be dense and growing while also failing to provide people with other quality options, which is what Lehmans seems to be suggesting by pulling back on safe streets projects in a doomed attempt to ease congestion.
Lacking any real basis for their argument that safe streets projects make congestion worse and cause more traffic deaths and injuries, Lehmans proceeds to make a series of absolutely unhinged guesses for how this all might work, writing, “Stop-and-go traffic leads to erratic driving and more conflicts — drivers cutting in and out, bursts of speed to make up time, more fatigue, distraction and road rage.”
Road rage! My jaw dropped when I read this line. Otherwise known as harassment, assault or murder, road rage is a violent crime. “Street safety projects might cause drivers to get angry and commit violent crimes” may be the worst argument against safe streets projects I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them as an independent bike journalist. Or if they don’t make people commit violence, then they might cause “fatigue.” I had no idea a bike lane could make a driver sleepy. People who can’t refrain from violence or stay awake in traffic shouldn’t be driving.
There are actual reasons why overly-congested streets can be more dangerous, though Lehmans didn’t list them. Here’s one we saw very clearly on Mercer Street: When cars get really backed-up, they block the crosswalks and bike lanes. This puts vulnerable road users in crosswalks and bike lanes in precarious positions as they try to cross the street. It also can lead to very dangerous t-bone collisions between cars if one lane is backed up while the one next to it is not. Baked-up traffic blocks people’s views of each other, which is dangerous. Safe streets advocates also don’t want this to happen. I spent years on this blog trying to get the city to clear the worst of the crosswalk blocking at 9th and Mercer, for example, which they finally addressed with a partial fix. It is perhaps instructive to note that Mercer Street does not have bike lanes or even bus lanes. The problem is entirely due to too many people driving cars to the I-5 ramps.
Unfortunately, this is how disinformation spreads. It doesn’t always make sense, it just needs to be “truthy.” If someone mentions the Barcelona study about congestion, that’s a red flag. “Safe streets are dangerous” is Orwellian doublespeak. It casts doubt and muddies the issue, which can still be damaging without needing to be a cohesive or logical argument. When I first read this op-ed and saw that there were zero web search results for the author “Nat Lehmans,” I was extremely suspicious that this was some kind of astroturfing piece out of the tobacco or oil industry playbooks. After some sleuthing, I am mostly sure that Nat Lehmans is a real person, just using a name never used on the internet before. I even asked the Seattle Times Opinion section desk, and they assure me that Nat is a real person. The effect could be the same as an astroturfing campaign, though. People who want to believe that bike lanes are causing the traffic that they are part of now have this op-ed from the Seattle Times telling them it’s because of safe streets projects and also that these projects don’t even make streets safer. It’s not true, but it might feel true.
When SDOT invests in Vision Zero safety redesigns, they work. Traffic congestion is caused by people driving. The only solution to the problem of traffic congestion in a dense and growing city is to provide people with options other than more car driving. The only way to increase biking, walking and transit is to redesign our streets so they are safer and more connected for more people to choose those modes rather than adding more cars to the backup line to the freeway ramp. Safe streets advocates are not your enemies, car drivers! Seattle, Boston and Minneapolis are probably the big US cities with the best chances of reaching Vision Zero, which is a beautiful goal we all need to work toward because we’re all in this together.
Serious problems with the Barcelona study
I am putting this at the end because it’s not really about Lehmans’ op-ed, but I was shocked that the Barcelona study does not even mention that the list of the top most congested cities in Europe according to TomTom, the dataset they used, is dominated by cities in Eastern Europe, many of them developed under the Soviet Union (Polish cities in particular are over-represented near the top of the list). The low and middle parts of the TomTom congestion list are dominated by cities in Western Europe. This seems like a huge and obvious trend within the data that would suggest the congestion-safety correlation may also be tapping into other cultural and infrastructure differences. The West-East divide in Europe shows up in all kinds of datasets for all kinds of issues, and you would expect scholars to at least acknowledge it as perhaps part of the correlation that they have uncovered. They also fail to mention wealth and transportation spending, which is also extremely relevant and likely a contributing factor to the correlation they found. Instead, the authors write a conclusion section that reeks of basic “correlation is not causation” errors. “According to our results, active policies to tackle congestion are urgently needed and might be further justified by the congestion-related additional cost regarding road safety outcomes in highly congested cities,” the authors write. I’m no scholarly researcher, but I don’t see how they can honestly draw such a specific conclusion without even attempting to address other obvious correlating factors. I’d love to hear thoughts on this from other transportation scholars.