Tag Archives: Bicycle Safety

News

South End Traffic Incidents Spur Efforts to Prioritize Pedestrian Safety

by Phil Manzano

Content Warning: This article includes video and discussion of a vehicle-pedestrian collision.

Taken from a camera mounted above the intersection of Rainier Avenue and Graham Street South, the high-angle traffic video has a grainy, gray quality but still reveals much. The streets are dry. It’s about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 25, and an eastbound silver Lexus coupe is turning left as three people — a mother and her two children — are walking across Rainier.

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Features

Weekend Reads: Getting to Zero Road Fatalities

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend’s read is the recently-released National Roadway Safety Strategy from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In 1980, there were over 50,000 roadway fatalities in the United States. Over the following thirty years the annual count dropped to about 32,000 due to a number of factors, including lowering the speed limit to 55, raising the drinking age to 21, mandates for better safety equipment in vehicles (including seat belts, air bags, passenger-side mirrors, and crush-proof roofs), and temporary use restrictions on new teenage drivers’ licenses. The simultaneous increase in the U.S. population hides the magnitude of the difference: the rate of roadway fatalities dropped from 3.5 per 100 million miles driven in 1980 down to about 1.1 in 2010. 

But in the last decade we stopped making progress in reducing fatalities; worse, in 2020 — when most people were staying home because of COVID — fatalities increased both in absolute numbers and in the rate (to about 1.4 per 100 million miles). Experts are unclear as to why the rate ticked up, though many theorize that having fewer cars on the road made it easier to drive faster.

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