The day before the report’s release, separate vehicles hit two boys riding their bicycles from Georgetown to Beacon Hill in the same intersection of Airport Way South and Corson Avenue South, within seconds of each other. The second boy was checking on his friend, who was struck first, when he was subsequently hit.
Three days later, an SUV reportedly traveling at a high speed crashed through a hair salon and deli in Columbia City, trapping a family who had been eating inside. The accident caused such significant damage that inspectors limited entry into the historic building.
The next morning, a left-turning truck killed a female bicyclist heading to work in Downtown Seattle at Second Avenue and University Street. Second Avenue has seen more than 60 bicyclist crashes in four and a half years, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT).
And, more recently, a Wallingford seventh-grader was struck by a car in a crosswalk on his way to school by a driver who allegedly ran a red light. The boy was seen rolling over the car and hitting his head on the windshield.
These are just the ones that drew the media’s attention — these don’t include the numerous minor accidents that take place day-to-day in a city with a population of more than 650,000. As recent incidents seem to indicate, there is cause for Seattle’s continuing decline in Allstate’s rankings (Seattle was 160th last year and 154th in 2012).
If Seattle drivers continue on this pace, the city — which has aggressively pushed an anti-car agenda since Mayor Mike McGinn’s tenure — will have little motivation to help improve traffic conditions for drivers. As it is, the city has invested nearly $36 million in bike lanes, sharrows, signed routes and bike parking spaces over the last four years, according to SDOT’s Bicycle Program website. Conversely, a recent SDOT assessment determined that more than $900 million of deferred paving maintenance needs to be done, according to Crosscut.
Bad driving is nothing new to Seattle, but the spate of city projects to improve non-driver safety — greenways, Safe Routes to Schools, designated bike lanes — shows that officials have little faith that our skills behind the wheel will ever improve.