https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/pope-leo-xiv-and-his-ai-manifesto-dignity-humanity-and-ethics/?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20260531&instance_id=176451&nl=the-morning&regi_id=104631560&segment_id=220735&user_id=47c8b430b58cedc54a540f740f3edaaf #davidhorsey #seattletimes #opinion #popeleo

Seattle is failing its #trees, #salmon, #orcas, and other life by lifting environmental protections in favor of developers building apartments and homes. Jennifer Godfrey, bass player with the #SeattleSymphony, is taking the lead in trying to reverse course before it's too late to keep the urban environment viable. Read this very good article by Alex Fryer from the #SeattleTimes at https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-orca-appeal-one-musicians-challenge-of-the-remaking-of-seattle/ and see what you might want to do about it.
#Seattle #environment #sustainability

Seattle Times opinion piece on Vision Zero is dangerously misleading

From the Seattle Times. Seattle Library card holders can access the story here. "Spending on safety isn't making Seattle streets less hazardous" This unequivocal headline in the Seattle Times is completely false. The op-ed it is attached to uses a very misleading analysis of available data to draw the unsupported conclusion that safe streets projects actually make Seattle more dangerous, not less. In fact, the author argues without a shred of evidence, safety would improve if the city instead focused on reducing car congestion. The most obvious and glaring issue that supersedes all the others in this piece is that the vast majority of Seattle's traffic deaths an injuries are happening on wide multi-lane streets where Seattle has not yet invested in a significant safety project. It is disingenuous at best to say that "spending on safety isn't making Seattle streets less hazardous" when the city has not spent money on safety for the streets with the majority of hazards. 80% of Seattle's pedestrian deaths occur on streets with multiple lanes traveling in the same direction, and when SDOT does carry out Vision Zero corridor projects on such streets they consistently reduce and often nearly eliminate injuries and deaths. The problem is that that the city has a huge backlog of dangerous streets to improve, and leaders have lacked the political will to make changes on the biggest problem streets like the persistent list-topping dangerous streets Aurora, Rainier Ave, MLK Way, Lake City Way, 4th Ave S as well as a long list of other persistent problem streets like 5th Ave downtown, SW Roxbury Street, Fauntleroy Way, SW Sylvan Way, Michigan Street in Georgetown, 1st Ave in downtown through to Georgetown, Holman Road, Northgate Way, NE 50th Street, N 85th Street, Jackson Street, and on and on. As Gordon Padelford, Executive Director of the Seattle Streets Alliance, wrote in his retort published Thursday in the Times (Seattle Library link), "the solutions to keep people safe while traveling on our streets are known. The problem has been a lack of political will — at all levels of government." Federal policies could help through safer vehicle design like European style mandates for safer vehicle front ends, passive in-vehicle drunken driving prevention, Intelligence Speed Assistance and distracted driving detection. But sadly, adoption of these lifesaving technologies are not expected anytime soon.  At the state level, despite being named a top priority, direct safety investment represents less than 5% of the state’s biennial transportation budget, according to the Transportation Choices Coalition. And the Washington State Department of Transportation needs additional policy direction to prioritize its responsibility to help redesign dangerous state routes that run through communities, like State Route 99 (Aurora Avenue North) and State Route 522 (Lake City Way). And at the city level, Seattle has been talking about the same dangerous streets since the beginning of the Vision Zero program in 2015. In Seattle, 80% of pedestrian fatalities occur on multiple-lane arterials. In particular, the top five most dangerous streets have remained Aurora Ave North, Rainier Avenue South, Fourth Avenue South, Lake City Way Northeast, and MLK Jr. Way South. When the Seattle Department of Transportation has been allowed to make changes, like the reconfiguration of the section of Rainier Avenue South through Columbia City, it led to reductions in speeding, crashes, injuries and deaths. However, SDOT has not had the backing of previous mayors to implement full redesigns of our most dangerous streets.  Take one project as an example. There are as many as 80 of our neighbors happily living life who would have been seriously injured in a traffic collision on Rainier Avenue if it weren't for a 2015 pilot project that redesigned a relatively short section of Rainier Avenue in the Columbia and Hillman City neighborhoods. As many as 10 of our neighbors might be dead. None of these people know that they were saved from serious injury or death because their collision never happened (one of the people saved could very well have been Nat Lehmans), but we know that from 2005 until 2015 an average of nine people were seriously injured and one person was killed in this one-mile stretch of Rainier Avenue every year. After the city's Vision Zero team redesigned the street to get rid of many of the hazards caused by its previous multi-lane design, the serious injury numbers dropped dramatically and there has not been a fatality, according to data from the Washington State Traffic Safety Commission. There are still some serious injuries and there is no safe way to bike on the street, but even this still-incomplete project has made an enormous difference in a lot of people's lives. When SDOT makes these changes, they work. The problem is that the city is completing these safety upgrades at a fraction of the rate we need, and there are far too many streets that remain outdated and dangerous. Beware of disinformation about safety projects and congestion The entire basis of Lehmans' argument relies on a 2021 paper out of the University of Barcelona that looked at the relationship between traffic congestion (measured as time spent traveling below the speed limit) and safety outcomes in a bunch of European cities of various sizes. Though results were rather scattered, there was a trend suggesting that cities with the least congestion had dangerous streets, but so do the cities with the most congestion. This is an interesting result, but Lehmans commits the sin of conflating correlation with causation while also drawing some very questionable conclusions that suggest a core misunderstanding of how "congestion" works. […]

https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/05/22/seattle-times-opinion-piece-on-vision-zero-is-dangerously-misleading/

Although I started subscribing to the AP feed early last year, I’m not paying for it. I do subscribe to the Seattle Times which uses the AP News network to access good coverage of contemporary events and since I pay a great deal to the Times, feel justified.
#AP #SeattleTimes #alternativemedia
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ap-says-it-will-offer-buyouts-as-part-of-pivot-away-from-newspaper-journalism/