Caption: Preschool children using a brand new traffic signal in Fremont. Photo courtesy of Fremont.com and Fremont Chamber of Commerce.

Of all the things we do to keep Seattle moving, public safety is by far our absolute highest priority. 

Mayor Jenny Durkan has announced four steps on December 10 to make our streets even safer and achieve our Vision Zero goal of ending traffic deaths and serious injuries on city streets by 2030. Along with lowering speed limits, one critical step is enhancing safety for people walking and rolling as they cross the street by installing leading pedestrian intervals.  

An alarmingly high number of serious crashes take place at crosswalks when people turning in cars hit people crossing the street. 

Installing leading pedestrian intervals (the technical term for re-timing traffic signals to give people a few seconds head start to begin walking across the street before people in cars get a green light) is one way to enhance safety. People in the crosswalks become more visible to people driving and this method has proven to reduce crosswalk collisions by 60%.  

Preventing crashes with a few seconds head start for a pedestrian.  

Federal Highway Administration: Leading pedestrian intervals prevent 60% of car versus pedestrian crashes.

New York City Department of Transportation: Deaths and serious injuries dropped by 40%.  

We’re committing to double the number of leading pedestrian intervals next year to 250 locations. That’s 25% of the traffic signals in Seattle.

We’re excited to announce signal upgrades are going way faster than we announced earlier this year. So we set a more ambitious goal and are committing to double the current number of leading pedestrian intervals by the end of 2020.  

We’ve been improving traffic signal safety at hundreds of intersections.

We prioritize safety upgrades where we’ve seen a concerning history of collisions, in urban centers, & near buildings like schools, hospitals, & community centers.

We also add leading pedestrian intervals every time we do other traffic signal maintenance work that creates the opportunity unless there’s a specific reason why it does not make sense in a particular location. 

We’ve added leading pedestrian intervals to 125 intersections so far.

Look out for each other. 

While we’re excited about increasing the number of LPIs across the city, we also want to take a moment to remind everyone that we all have a role to play in improving safety. 

As you’re traveling Seattle’s streets, look out for yourself and for each other. Recognize that every intersection is unique, so stay alert. If you’re driving, pay attention, slow down, and expect people are walking and biking in every part of the city at all times of day.  

With your help, and with changes big and small, we can get closer to our Vision Zero goal of ending traffic deaths and serious injuries on city streets by 2030. 

Safety is the top priority when we install new traffic signals. 

Building new traffic signals is another way we’re working to enhance safety by using city-wide collision data to help prioritize where signals are most needed.  

Some of the new traffic signals we’ve built this year include 1st Ave NW & NW 36th St in Fremont, the Smith Cove Cruise Terminal at Pier 91, and 35th Ave NE & NE 68th St in Wedgwood. Next year, we plan to build new traffic signals along high traffic areas in South Seattle, High Point, Bitter Lake, and Lake City. 

A traffic signal at Aurora Ave N & N 92nd St lets school children press a button to control when cars get a red light. Collisions in this area have dropped by 50% since this push-button signal was built in 2017. Photo courtesy of Dongho Chang

We’re also planning to keep on working on other ways to make traffic signals safer for people walking, rolling, and biking.  

In 2020, we plan to make updates to our traffic signal policy, including the guidelines we use to make sure people of all ages and abilities have enough time to get across the street safely.  

We’ll also be taking a look at how we use push-buttons to address frustrations we’ve heard. We don’t want to make you press a button if you don’t need to, and there are also some places where giving pedestrians control to stop car-traffic makes the most sense. So we want to make sure that we’re programming these buttons consistently with a pedestrian’s perspective in mind.  

The goal will be to balance the needs of all modes of transportation so that everyone can get where they need to go safely and conveniently.  

Mayor Jenny Durkan has announced 4 steps to make our streets even safer & achieve our Vision Zero goal of ending traffic deaths & serious injuries on city streets by 2030.  

Along with making crosswalks safer, one step is reducing speed limits to 25 miles per hour (MPH) on major streets citywide. The speed limit on smaller neighborhood streets was already reduced to 20 miles per hour.  

Today we launched the effort by reducing speeds to 25 MPH along Rainier Ave S., which will now have a consistent speed limit for 3.5 miles south of S Alaska St. 

In 2020, we will begin lowering speeds on the rest of Seattle’s major streets, starting in Southwest and Southeast Seattle. We’re also working closely with our partners at WSDOT to lower speeds on state highways within our city, including Aurora Ave and Lake City Way.  

Traffic deaths & injuries are a serious epidemic, & reducing speed limits helps ensure everyone can travel safely.

Severe crashes are increasing all over the country. Even in Seattle, which is consistently recognized as one of the safest cities in the country, there are over 13,000 crashes a year. On average, 20 people die, and 150 people are seriously injured each year, and while the trend dipped in 2018, it has gone back up in 2019. This trend is not acceptable. We don’t want anyone to experience the tragedy of a friend or loved one being killed by a collision.  

Reducing speed limits has a proven safety benefit.

A person walking, rolling, or biking is twice as likely to be killed if they are hit by a person driving 30 MPH than someone going 25 MPH. 90% of people hit by cars going 20 MPH are injured but survive. 

A person’s chance of surviving being hit by a car decreases drastically with faster speeds. Graphic: ProPublica. Data: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety report.

We’ve seen increases in safety everywhere we’ve reduced speed limits to 25 mph. 

• Downtown & South Lake Union: 10% fewer crashes and 20% fewer severe injuries and deaths  
• Greenwood & Phinney Ridge: Crashes were lowered by 34% 
• Greenlake & Roosevelt: 44% reduction in collisions 

It’s not just Seattle. New York City dropped speed limits throughout their city to 25 MPH in 2014. From 2014 to 2018, they were one of the only major cities in the country to see a consistent drop in traffic fatalities. The World Health Organization has concluded that a 5% reduction in average speed can result in a 30% decrease in traffic fatalities.  

Slow & steady wins the race. Speeding causes collisions, & collisions cause 25% of traffic congestion.

We expect a negligible impact on how long it takes people driving to get where they’re going. Most trips will only take 20-40 seconds longer to drive a mile at 25 MPH than the current speed limit. About a quarter of the time we spend sitting in traffic is due to collisions, and lowering speed limits prevents about a third of them. It’s a win–win. 

Practicing the 3 E’s. Along with engineering, enforcement & education are both critical parts of our Vision Zero efforts. 

As we implement lower speed limits, we’ll be installing signs at more frequent spacing so drivers see the speed limit more often. And as part of Mayor Durkan’s four steps, in 2020, Vision Zero Street Teams will share information about lower speed limits at educational events throughout the city. Speed limit information and safe driving tips will be shared through print, social, and ethnic media.   

The City will also create a new Major Crash Review Task Force which will convene a panel of experts to analyze every serious and fatal collision in our City and provide recommendations to prevent similar incidents from happening again. The City will also launch Vision Zero Street Teams raise awareness around transportation safety issues and educate the public about lower speed limits and other infrastructure projects.

We work closely with our friends at the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to enforce the rules of the road and keep everyone safe, with a focus on warnings first to raise awareness. We’re working with SPD to develop further strategies to ensure traffic enforcement is equitable and does not disproportionally impact communities of color. We use data to inform focus areas to make sure to consider both collision trends and demographics to determine locations for enforcement. We take a high visibility approach to enforcement and inform people about our additional hours of enforcement through our network of dynamic message signs and media. After all, the intent of the added hours of enforcement is not to issue citations, but to change behaviors.