Man struck from behind while biking on section of Lake Washington Blvd where city dropped planned safety upgrades
Photo from Bradley Hawkins.
If you’ve ever seen someone biking around town pulling a bright yellow or magenta cello case in a bike trailer, you’ve seen Bradley Hawkins. Even without his cello, he’s a self-identified “die-hard bicycle dude” who has been biking pretty much everywhere for a long time. But all that could have easily come to an end last week when someone driving a Hyundai Elantra ran into him from behind while he was biking on Lake Washington Boulevard on a section of road where the city under Mayor Bruce Harrell’s leadership recently cut some planned speed humps and intersection safety improvements. The person responsible never stopped, fleeing the scene and leaving behind a pile of broken car parts and a seriously injured Hawkins.
“I feel really lucky,” said a mobile but bandaged-up Hawkins when I spoke to him in his home a few days after the collision. Hawkins is a longtime reader and friend of the blog. His bike is damaged well beyond repair, but he somehow didn’t have any broken bones. He has pain between his shoulders and in his lower back, and he has scrapes and bruises all over, but it could have been a lot worse.
Photo from Hawkins.
“If I had had the cello behind, I bet I wouldn’t have gotten hit,” Hawkins joked (or maybe he was serious, he did bike his cello to Friday Harbor once). But he was on his way home from a long three-day tour of Oregon and Washington “to see as many volcanoes as I could.” He started in Breitenbush and rode to Mounts Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St. Helens and Rainier. On August 13, he woke up on St. Helens and rode to Rainier before heading back to Seattle.
“It was starting to get dark around Renton, so I decided to go up Lake Washington Boulevard because I figured it would be safer,” he said. His bike had a bright front and rear lights as well as large reflectors on the back of his panniers and helmet, so he was fully prepared for night biking. In Renton, he rode a bit with a bunch of teens on Lime bikes and was feeling good about the world. As he got further north on Lake Washington Boulevard, he noticed the new center lane reflectors and lane-edge fog lines that the city added, and he said he felt like people were driving faster than usual.
“I’ve ridden Lake Washington Boulevard at all hours, and at least ten times at night this year, and I get the sense the cars are going a lot faster now,” he said. He worried that the new fog lines look too much like bike lanes even though they are not wide enough to be real bike lanes, and the shoulder space varies in width along the road. “Every driver is going to think that bicyclists need to be in that spot,” he said of the fog lines. “That was worse than nothing, putting those lines in.”
As he approached the fishing pier south of Mount Baker Beach, “I noticed somebody was not moving over and going at a clip, and I got hit from behind,” he said. “I somehow ended up in the grass on the side of the road, got on my hands and knees, lifted my hand up, and a car stopped.” The first person to stop came to his aid, then someone with EMT experience showed up and got him to lie back down until Seattle Fire Department medics arrived. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center and spent about eight hours there. The driver never stopped to render aid and remains at large.
“All that I know about them is from the parts that they left,” said Hawkins. He has a rearview mirror, a fog light, and two pieces of the front fender for a 2011–2013 Hyundai Elantra. It’s possible there was additional damage like a cracked windshield or dented hood, but it happened so fast Hawkins isn’t sure. Given the number of car pieces left behind, it was clearly a high-speed impact. Seattle Police arrived and started an investigation, but Hawkins hadn’t heard any updates on the case as of our interview.
As his ride-tracking app notes, it was an abrupt end to what had been his longest recorded ride:
Not the best way to earn a PR. Screenshot from Hawkins.
A Seattle Parks project map from 2024 shows that the city had planned multiple speed humps on the segment of road where Hawkins was struck, including two within a few hundred feet of the location where the collision occurred. A series of speed humps had been installed in the southern segment of the project as a first phase of work, and rest were scheduled for installation this summer before the department suddenly backtracked in July and cancelled nearly all the remaining safety upgrades. When crews went to work in late July, they painted new wide stripes on the side of the street (that are not bike lanes) and added some reflectors to the dashed yellow center line. Neither the lane reflectors nor wider fog lines had been mentioned in public outreach materials before July. One of the new wide fog lines is visible in Hawkins’ bike wreckage photo from the scene.
The green boxes note approximate locations for the planned speed cushions, which the city cut from the plan despite years of public outreach strongly in favor of improving safety on the street.
Hawkins said the new center lane reflectors make the road feel more like a freeway, and perhaps they also make it so his lights and reflectors didn’t stand out as much. While we can’t know for sure whether speed humps would have prevented this collision, they do slow vehicle speeds, and speed is a top factor in both the likelihood of a collision and the severity of a collision. Unfortunately, the only person who knows what role the street changes (or lackthereof) played in the collision fled the scene and is still at large, so we cannot ask them (or get them to pay for Hawkins’ health care and bike replacement). Hit and run is a shameful crime.
It’s also shameful for the city, and in this case Mayor Harrell especially, to choose to remove safety from city park and street investments. Hawkins is far from the first person to be injured in a collision in this area, as Seattle Parks’ own study from 2024 clearly documented:
Map from
a spring 2024 traffic study by Seattle Parks (PDF). I marked the approximate collision location.
We don’t need to see anymore to call it: The Settle Parks 2024-25 Lake Washington Boulevard Renovations project has failed. The next mayor should commit to a complete redo under SDOT’s Vision Zero program, our city’s staff of professional street safety experts. The Board of Park Commissioners may also want to look into how the Parks Department blew this project so badly. Cancelling most the publicly-announced project elements and secretly replacing them with never-discussed and much less effective ones just weeks before construction is not good governance and points to some serious issues within the department (in my original story from July I had to use the Wayback Machine to figure out what had been cut because this information was not disclosed in the department’s communications). Seattle expects and deserves better from its Parks Department.
What happened to Bradley Hawkins is yet another reminder of what is at stake when we are planning and investing in street safety projects. We are talking about people’s lives. It’s not hyperbole, and it’s not “cars versus bikes” or any of the other garbage that too often weighs down these debates. Seattle Parks and Mayor Harrell made a huge mistake, safe streets advocates made it clear that it was a mistake, and then this happens to a guy who was just biking home to the Central District after a lovely vacation. Southeast Seattle deserves safe streets, and Lake Washington Boulevard should be an oasis where everyone can enjoy the lakeside without being put at risk of a serious traffic injury or worse.
In a complete coincidence, Seattle Bike Blog and friends are hosting a family-friendly bicycle rally for Katie Wilson tomorrow (August 23) on Lake Washington Boulevard. Meet at 11 a.m. near 43rd Ave S. This event was planned before Hawkins was injured, but his story will certainly add fuel to the community push for safety on this street and mayor who will take this work seriously.
#SEAbikes #Seattle
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