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CREDIT: SDOT/NONWHITEWORKS/NAOMI ISHISAKA/MICHAEL B MAINE

Late last month, I reported that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) collaborated with a black-owned consulting firm, NONWHITEWORKS, to place billboards on Rainier Avenue that drew attention, in a colorful manner, to its horrible safety record. On average, this street experiences a boggling crash a day. The city's attempts to address this crisis have been insignificant. SDOT can't do that much because it's committed to the religion of car mobility. And so what's left? Make the dangers of the street as public as possible.

Two of the billboards communicating this message went up at the end of August. They are now gone. My source claims that the Mayor's Office requested they be taken down (for reasons yet to be determined). I requested a response from SDOT about the claim about the removal of the billboards this morning. It is now past 5 p.m., and I can't say I'm enjoying this silence from the mayor's department. We have no public recognition of the permitted lawlessness on Rainier (fast driving), and no public acknowledgment of this lawlessness.

And what do I mean by the permitted lawlessness on Rainier exactly? To make my point, I must, sadly, disagree with Gene Balk's wording when it comes to this sort of thing. (Let it be known I'm a big fan of his contributions to the Seattle Times.) Balk calls it "bad driving."


What many euphemistically describe as bad driving is in fact just lawless driving. It is the kind of driving that this mode of transportation could only encourage. Driving because you are all that matters in the world. You must get to where you are going. And because no one else on the road is going to this exact destination, you are at odds with the law that makes sure that all will get where they are going within the limits of safety. This safety presents a paradox. It makes the driver responsible to others. But the car is a technology that privileges the driver alone. Because the temporal locus of the latter tends to be the immediate, it easily overwhelms the wider, social logic of the former. This is the kind of driving that dominates Rainier.

Two things. The enforcement of traffic laws is actually declining in our city. This is what Gene Balk, Seattle Times's data superhero, has determined. And we should not be surprised by this finding. But corresponding to the trend of the decline in car policing is Sound Transit's stepped-up policing of the riders on its Link trains. But it takes almost no effort of reasoning to see that a person who has not paid their fare is not at all equivalent to a person speeding down a dense city street. The train rider's offense has put no life in danger. And yet, we live in a city where the patrolling of fare violations on trains is intensifying, and the policing of cars is on the decline. Please, reader, absorb the utter absurdity of this situation. And we have not even included the benefits a train rider gives to the city, and those that a driver takes from it.