Don't say traffic slowdown, say street chill!
It sounds so much better!

What a fucking lie. A car didn’t try to take a turn on Aurora too fast, a car was being driven by a methed out homeless tweaker from out of town who deliberately tried to kill people with her car. But intent is meaningless to your narrative.

Long overdue, especially since so many pedestrians in Seattle step out into crosswalks without ever checking the oncoming traffic. Just because vehicles are supposed to stop for you doesn't mean that at the speed they're traveling they're ABLE to stop in time not to run your sorry, oblivious ass over.

Even if only a very small handful of people are still alive and well as a result of this, it's an unconditionally good thing.

She must realize how angry people who actually live here are, when they want their property taxes going to 1/3 transit, 1/3 bike/pedestrian, and 1/3 cars and they get 80-90 percent going to cars.

A lot of people who live here use transit, bike, and/or walk, and they pay property taxes that subsidize the planet-destroying War By Suburban Cars On Citizens.

People can no longer be trusted to cross a street without stepping into oncoming traffic. When did folks decide we need to be saved from ourselves. Oh, yeah when you turn 18 and become legally responsible for your actions.

I assume the slowdown will apply to the buses, and to light rail when it's at grade, too. Because we all need our commutes to be that much longer.

How about encouraging big corporations to allow more employee telecommuting, and reduce the number of vehicles of all sorts that are on the road?

You know when a cyclist or two is run down by cars, and the city does emphasis patrols in response? And the SPD proceeds to set up a trap to ticket -- no, not drivers! -- cyclists at a stop sign somewhere? Even though the people paying them wanted them to do something about cars hitting cyclists? Cops don't really think of themselves as working for the mayor, or for you. They work for the abstract concept of the "real America", the America that the Trumpers want to make great again. A lot of good people join the police force but they learn quick that it's not about doing good, it's about toeing the blue line. Or they're out.

Robots are really good at handing out speeding tickets. Advanced countries have been using them for years. Technology like that isn't just for them, the US could use it too. They check your speed, take a picture, and mail a ticket. No cops!

They don't care what race the driver is. They don't toe the blue line. Unarmed civil servants with no connection to cop culture can do traffic enforcement too, if you think of it more as handing out notices of fines rather than The Man come to cuff you. Traffic stops are dangerous because cops bring the implied violence.

Vision zero can work. But like everything else, cops are no more the solution than sending in the military to fix Afghanistan, or Iraq. Just have to make a clean break from the mentality that gave us the failed drug war and all our failed military interventions.

This is a joke. If the city can’t (or won’t) enforce the current speed limits, then how will posting lower speed limits change anything? (I say this as someone who hears the drag racing on Lake City Way on a regular basis.) This is simply a PR move by Durkan to pretend that she’s doing something. Nothing will change.

And yeah, Nathalie, it was really disingenuous to refer to the meth-head pedestrian murderer in this post, as a lower speed limit wouldn’t have stopped her from driving impaired. Nice try.

To reach this ridiculous "Vision Zero" goal, we need much more intelligent pedestrians, and much better drivers. I am basically 60% pedestrian and 40% driver (mostly for my job). Seattle pedestrians enter intersections without looking (usually because they are on their phone) and tend to do things like walk down the middle of residential streets wearing dark clothes in the middle of the night.

I hit 80 in the tunnel this week, late one evening.

Sweet!

Luckily the hobos and junkies don’t start playing frogger on the highway til the Aloha Hotel.

Catalonia, in 1925, there were more than 200 deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled. That number today is less than a dozen, soon to drop below 10. It was not because drivers got better -- not fundamentally -- in the last 95 years, or pedestrians are more intelligent now than in 1920 or 1930. We made a choice to do something about drunks, yes, but it's the same dummies as ever behind the wheel. People have always been clueless morons who mostly mean well if it doesn't personally cost them too much. What's changed is technologies and systems and protocols. Mostly what's changed is the definition of "normal".

Seat belts were once seen as an absurd inconvenience and what the hell, we're all going to die anyway. But who would count up how many people they know who were killed in traffic accidents and multiply that number by 10. In retrospect, all the nanny state shit, driver education and better engineered roads and antilock brakes and airbags adds up to more of your friends and family being alive. If you had told them in 1920 that they could reduced the fatality rate of cars to less than a tenth of what they were used to, they would have said "ridiculous".

It's a matter of will. We choose to wear seatbelts. We could stop: we could lose the will to wear them and the will to enforce wearing them. People would start dying at the rate they did in the 60s. If we have the will to make seat belts an unquestioned norm, we can someday have the will to do what it takes to make today's death rate seem like the barbarism it is. This is a choice, not inevitability.

I feel like a blanket proposal to lower all speed limits on arterials is a crude solution to a complicated problem. If you think about it, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to our urban planning. Stop lights and crosswalk lights could use an update. Maybe it would make more sense to have a countdown to red instead of a yellow light that requires you to react quickly. Crosswalk lights have countdowns but they almost never coincide with the light timing and half of the time you need to push a button then wait a full light cycle. For a technologically advanced city we sure have some antiquated technology.

Speeding is tamable too. There's one street next to Brookside Elementary School in Lakeforest Park that has photo enforcement for the speed limit and it's the only place I would never be brave enough to exceed it. So just put up cameras everywhere. There might be some unintended consequences though, like higher taxes to implement those, a full-on surveillance state, or more distracted driving from people closely monitoring their speed.

I just saw a car blow through a stop sign in the U District this morning, not even slowing, making a right turn where they wouldn't have been able to see anyone to the right, at the roundabout at N 41st and 2 blocks W of University Avenue N.

So, I guess it's not working, since there were two pedestrians, one going E-W and one going S-N at that roundabout surrounded by stop signs.