Fuck Cars
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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.