Seattle is not on a path to Vision Zero by 2030. In fact, the city is still heading in the wrong direction.
The good news is that when SDOT implements safety redesigns of dangerous streets, they work. The fatality counts for people biking and driving are relatively flat, which means the bicycle fatality rate is actually down due to increases in ridership. However, the city does not conduct nearly enough safety improvements each year, and they have not made significant safety upgrades to the streets with the highest rates of serious injuries and deaths for people walking and rolling.
The majority of serious injuries and deaths occur on the city’s high-injury network, and many of the worst streets are the same year after year such as Aurora Ave N, Northgate Way, Denny Way, Rainier Ave S, 4th Ave S, Lake City Way, S Jackson Street, S Michigan Street, MLK Way S (which had an unusually light couple years during 2020-24), Olive Way and more. 80% of pedestrian-involved collisions happen on streets with multiple lanes in the same direction, a design we know to be dangerous in ways that America’s trend toward larger cars with impeded driver visibility only make worse. Our Vision Zero efforts are swimming against the stream because U.S. vehicle standards and purchasing trends are pulling the wrong way. This means that the city needs to significantly scale up its output of safety interventions if we have any hope of meeting our 2030 goal.
Last year, the Vision Zero program conducted one safety corridor project on N 130th Street. This year they have three planned: S Henderson Street, Renton Ave S, and Spring Street. These are all good projects, but only Spring Street is red on the high-injury map (though several are orange). We need, like, 5 times this many projects per year. Maybe 10 times. Scaling up will require changes in how they are delivered, including budgets and timelines. But most importantly, it will require clear political guidance and leadership from both Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council communicating to the public that they should expect to see a lot more new safety improvements than they have seen in the past because we are making a push to save lives.
SDOT also needs to get its full department on board with its traffic safety goals. It is notable that some of the streets in the updated high-injury network map based on 2020-24 data are streets where SDOT made major investments in recent years but chose not to make safety upgrades, such as N/NE 50th Street. Seattle Bike Blog called this out back in 2019 when the city invested to fully repave the street only to paint back the same senselessly dangerous design with multiple lanes in the same direction, a design we know will result in traffic injuries and deaths. We wrote then, “There is no legitimate justification for double-barrel travel lanes on a city street, yet Seattle has no process through which the building of these dangerous lanes are forced to prove their value, viability and alignment with our other city goals. And it’s time for that to change.”
I already knew that N/NE 50th Street is dangerous because it is the reason my eight-year-old child cannot walk to her friend’s house on her own, and it is by far the most stressful and dangerous barrier when we bike to her school together. It has also left people with no safe way to bike from the U District to Tangletown. However, it is distressing to see that since this repaving project was completed, N/NE 50th Street has become a red line on the high injury network map signifying the highest level of danger. This was a post-Vision Zero paving project. How can SDOT say that safety is their number one priority when they recently built a street that is now among its most dangerous? I’m not a traffic injury Nostradamus! My prediction in that 2019 post was not luck. SDOT knows better than I do that painting multiple lanes in the same direction will result in injuries and deaths while dramatically reducing the rate of yielding to people trying to cross the street, so this result was known before they even built it. If our city truly takes Vision Zero seriously, then the N/NE 50th Street project appearing red on the high-injury network map should be a scandal.
SDOT Chief Transportation Safety Officer Venu Nemani told the Transportation Committee last week about how SDOT always goes back after a Vision Zero project to evaluate how it affected both safety and traffic flow. Why doesn’t SDOT conduct evaluations of paving projects that did not include any safety updates? Why hasn’t the high injury rate on NE 50th Street triggered a response from SDOT to intervene and fix the dangerous problem they created? And why is SDOT currently considering repeating the same mistake on Elliott and Western, using the same arguments (PDF) for not building bike lanes past Broad Street or making other safety improvements that they gave during the same phase of their failure on N/NE 50th Street? “It’s not in the bike plan map.” So what? Western is an orange line on that high-injury network map, so the question that matters is: Would it make the street safer for all road users?
Councilmember Rob Saka during the committee meeting suggested a 72-hour response rule for fixing traffic safety issues after a death (or, I’ll add, an injury) just like SDOT has for responding to pothole reports. As Nemani replied, it often takes longer than that for investigations to be completed so that causes can be properly identified, which is fair. But the idea behind a rapid response of some kind is excellent and, frankly, common sense. Identify a problem, announce a fix, accept public feedback, incorporate feedback that is useful, then build it. Use semi-temporary materials like paint, precast curbs and plastic posts that can be installed quickly and adjusted if needed, then bake it all in with permanent curbs the next time the street is repaved or as funding becomes available. SDOT already knows how to do this, the department just is not doing it at the scale we need and typically does not do it on our busier or more complicated high-injury network streets.
As the city is preparing to audit the Vision Zero Program, I urge everyone involved to expand the scope of such an audit beyond the Vision Zero Program itself and instead look at the full department as well as the impact of Washington State’s transportation facilities and policies. The Vision Zero Program gets results when it takes action, but it’s only conducting a handful of significant projects each year. The high-injury network map is full of streets that are either state highways or connect to state highways. Our downtown and our neighborhoods have multi-lane roads and highway access ramps that are killing and injuring people relentlessly and dispassionately.
As someone who has been covering traffic safety issues in Seattle since 2010, the solution has always been obvious. Fix the streets where people keep getting injured and killed. That may at times mean increasing travel times, a trade that is well worth it to save the lives of our friends, family and neighbors. No street should be too large to touch, and all our transportation agencies need to be focused on achieving this goal together.
Below is the video of SDOT’s presentation to the Transportation Committee (presentation PDF):