Walking in Seattle, the pedestrian-safety blog, crunched the city Department of Transportation's (SDOT) numbers on pedestrian fatalities between 2001 and 2009, and found that at least 28 of the 104 pedestrian deaths in those years occurred on streets that would be good candidates for road diets, or rechannelizations, which usually involve reducing the number of lanes on a street, adding a turning lane, and adding bike lanes or sharrows. (Map here).

Road diets, which the city started implementing in the 1970s, tend to calm traffic, improving safety for all road users, including drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Opponents of biking and pedestrian infrastructure have vocally opposed road diets, arguing that they infringe on drivers' rights (including, presumably, the right to exceed the speed limit, since SDOT's data have consistently shown that road diets don't increase travel times, although they do reduce the number of speeders).

SDOT considers a road eligible for a road diet if road users routinely exceed the speed limit, if the road has a history of collisions, and if the number of car lanes can be reduced without impacting carrying capacity. Generally, that translates to roads that have four lanes and fewer than 25,000 cars a day.