On Other Blogs
Sightline's Alan Durning: Let Cities Lower Speed Limits
Photo via PATH.
In the wake of last week's hit-and-run collision--in which a speeding driver slammed his or her SUV into 44-year-old PATH photographer Michael Wang, who was riding his bike on Dexter Ave.---Sightline's Alan Durning argues in the Seattle Times that it's time to get rid of the red tape that makes it hard for cities to lower speed limits on dangerous streets.
Currently, Durning writes, state law mandates extensive, costly speed and engineering studies just to lower the speed limit on a road from, say, 30 mph to 20 mph, despite the fact that "some 91 percent of 2009 Northwest traffic deaths occurred on streets with speed limits of 30 mph, like Dexter, or higher."
The bill didn't just pass out of the state house; it passed unanimously, with 92 house members present and six excused. It died in the senate transportation committee, whose chair, Mary Margaret Haugen has historically been less than friendly to non-highway transportation projects like transit and bike lanes.
In the wake of last week's hit-and-run collision--in which a speeding driver slammed his or her SUV into 44-year-old PATH photographer Michael Wang, who was riding his bike on Dexter Ave.---Sightline's Alan Durning argues in the Seattle Times that it's time to get rid of the red tape that makes it hard for cities to lower speed limits on dangerous streets.
Currently, Durning writes, state law mandates extensive, costly speed and engineering studies just to lower the speed limit on a road from, say, 30 mph to 20 mph, despite the fact that "some 91 percent of 2009 Northwest traffic deaths occurred on streets with speed limits of 30 mph, like Dexter, or higher."
The rest of the Northwest trusts its localities more than we do. In June, Oregon passed a law giving cities discretion to reduce speed to 20 mph on residential roadways.
Washington's Legislature took up a similar bill this year, HR 1217, the "local speed limit bill." It garnered bipartisan support and passed the House unanimously, but the Senate failed to move it out of committee. The bill would have let city officials use their judgment about establishing 20 mph residential zones.
The national nonprofit Transportation for America has found that only 1 percent of pedestrian deaths during the last decade occurred on streets with posted speeds of 20 mph or lower. The laws of physics are the reason. Newton showed that doubling speed requires quadrupling kinetic energy. It also quadruples stopping distance, and it radically increases the crushing force of impact. A 1994 study from the United Kingdom estimated that if a vehicle is traveling at 20 mph when it hits a pedestrian, the chance of death for the pedestrian is 5 percent. At the Dexter Avenue speed limit of 30 mph, the chance of death multiplies ninefold, to 45 percent. At 40 mph, the chance of death rises to 85 percent.
A lower speed limit might or might not have saved Michael Wang's life. The hit-and-run driver of the brown SUV that killed him could well have been oblivious to posted speeds. We cannot know. What we can know, and what the spontaneous memorial that has emerged at Dexter and Thomas reminds us, is that it's time for Olympia to get out of the way and let us make our streets safer.
The bill didn't just pass out of the state house; it passed unanimously, with 92 house members present and six excused. It died in the senate transportation committee, whose chair, Mary Margaret Haugen has historically been less than friendly to non-highway transportation projects like transit and bike lanes.
